


Weepy Chests with Weepy Sighs

by twnkwlf



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Use, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Forced Prostitution, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-28 04:51:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twnkwlf/pseuds/twnkwlf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If they shifted the pieces of themselves together, they were almost fine. They were almost something. They weren’t  just the ashes of what the Girl on Fire left behind. An AU in which Peeta is the sole Victor of the 74th Hunger Games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

_beat weighty tests with lofty cries_

_lofty cries with trembling thighs_

_weepy chests with weepy sighs_

_weepy skin with trembling thighs_

_you must be hovering over yourself_

_watching us drip on each others sides_

* * *

He didn't actually watch it happen until he next morning. And by then, she'd been dead for almost three hours.

In those long days that she was in the arena, Gale's hours went a little like this:

He would wake from a restless sleep to a cold morning, earlier than early, so that he could hunt before catching the first recap on the projector at the Hob. He didn't waste time in the woods; they didn't feel right when he was all alone. But all the same, the woods made him think of her, and he'd touch the trees, wondering how the trees in the arena felt compared to these. He wondered if she was scaling the trees and thinking of him, too.

He'd kill a thing or two and listen, listen, listen for anything- a hovercraft or a whizzing arrow. In the early morn, it was too quiet. The birds weren't up yet.

Around five, the only one at the Hob would be Greasy Sae, getting started on whatever stew was selling that day. So he'd normally go over to her and they'd exchange a few words that were all full of anticipation on his end, then Sae would fire up the portable projector while he helped her gut squirrels. He'd watch out of the corner of his eye for the Capitol seal to come up, and he'd be filled with a mixture of dread and urgency that tricked his brain. Did he want to watch the Games? Hell no, but he needed to see her.

His hands would still on the carcass as he watched what was happening on the projector. It was always bad, always worse.

Worse especially when the frustration set. He felt the ice layering over and over in his heart. He watched Peeta Mellark touch his girl (who was never really his girl). People in the District really loved Mellark. They talked about him like he was a fucking toy bear, a little sad thing that was _so brave,_ putting up s _uch a fight_ (of course, when they talked about Katniss, they usually said things like, _smart girl, she'll win, she's strong_ ). Mostly, they talked about the two of them as a pair. How they could both come home. It was such an unprecedented thing, the two victor rule. All anyone talked about was them.

It was perverted. She wasn't herself in that cave, and that thought stabbed at his heart because he didn't _understand._ She was so indifferent to the boys at school who he'd caught leering at her meaty hips. She ate better than most in the Seam, and it showed in her ass and he curves. The schoolboys weren't used to that- the fullness of a merchant and the darkness of a Seam brat. They loved her and she never noticed them. And she never noticed him, or that he looked at her the same way.

On the day she died, he woke from a nap. The light told him it was mid-afternoon, that they all had slept through lunch. It was too late to go hunting, too late to meet up with Sae, and the words "too late" reverberated again and again. His stomach lurched and he groaned.

This morning, the big dark guy from Eleven was run through with a sword, which meant there was four left. The Career from Two, the Redhead, Mellark, and _her_. Anything could've happened while he was asleep.

Prim, who was sleeping next to him, woke when he did. She blinked and looked around, finally finding him with her bleary eyes. Posy slept tightly against her chest. Rory was on the floor beneath the bed. They were all up late last night watching, trying to fight away the nervous energy with hot tea that only kept them up longer. And Hazelle suggested they all try to get another hour of sleep while they could.

"What should we do?" Prim whispered after a moment, after rubbing her eyes.

"We should watch."

Prim sat up a bit to lean against Gale's side as Posy gave a little snort of discomfort. All three of them in the bed had made it sweaty in the afternoon heat.

He didn't mind having Prim here. Her mother didn't seem to be such great company in those days. So she sometimes slept here, in the bed that everyone in Gale's family frequented. There was only two beds- one that Hazelle would share with the kids and one that Gale would. Prim read stories to Posy, helped his mother work the washing rack, and was teaching Rory how to make cheese. At the designated times, she would return home to watch the Games with her mother, but come back with some kind of token; an extra banket, a cup of milk, an old toy for the kids. He didn't know if this was meant to be a payment for their kindness, or a token of celebration for Katniss living though another day. In any case, he promised to look after her.

"Should we wake them up? Should I get Mother?" she asked. He realized, with a sickening lurch of his stomach, they had slept through the mandatory viewing hours. It was strange that Sabina hadn't come knocking, looking for Prim, but Sabina Everdeen was passive looking to Gale while the world seemed to unravel into chaos.

These were undoubtedly the last few days of the Games. Maybe they should all watch together, weather the storm with each other. He thought about it, but a thin calmness was in the room with them. He heard his mother snoring on the other bed and decided not to disturb the peace.

He picked Prim up, light as a baby bird, and carried her out to the kitchen where the old television sat on a table. Normally it was coal-dusty and forgotten, but the dust had been cleared from the screen. It was in much more use theses days. He sat with Prim, sleepy in his lap. Already the Capitol seal occupied the screen because the televisions were automatically programmed to run the mandatory shows like Snow's announcements.

And the Hunger Games.

While Gale glanced at the pale blue Seam outside, Prim didn't avert her eyes from the screen at all.

The Capitol anthem interrupted the quiet with it's crass horns and percussion. They showed the streets outside with the screaming citizens flooding the City Circle, songs playing, flowing drinks, and the lights relentlessly studio was all lit in colors that illuminated the kitchen. Switching, red to purple, off and on into the dark space, on Gale and Prim's faces.

Peeta Mellark's head was also flashing on the screen, the caption reading "VICTOR". The celebration had been going on for hours.

Prim whimpered.

"But- but what about her?" he started. "What about her?"

 _"The trick with the berries was very smart, don't you think, Finnick?"_ they heard Claudius Templesmith ask. He sat inside the large studio with a handful of past victors on the lush interview couches. Behind them, banners were hung with Mellark's face.

 _"She definitely had the skills and to take Cato down, no doubt. It's a shame it wasn't enough, but the strongest fighter wins,"_ the pretty guy replied.

_"Or the most handsome in your case, right Finnick?"_

And they laughed like the world wasn't ending.

Prim wept as they began the recap. They watched it all. It started with the Redhead eating those berries Mellark picked. She dropped to the ground, convulsed, and her eyes rolled back in her head. It only took a moment for her to die.

Katniss taught Gale about Nightlock. Not too long ago, he did the same thing that Peeta did, picking the whole bush, thinking that the berries were going to be a rare sweetness. When she saw them, she yelled, never let him hear the end of it. After that he became more familiar with her family book, the one with the plants and herbs in it, because she insisted that he learn basic forging skills. He taught her how to set a fowl trap in return. His eyes began to sting as the nostalgia rolled through him.

At this part, Rory came into the kitchen with Posy tucked in his arms. She began to babble the way that young things do, a sound that momentarily blocked out Katniss screaming Mellark's name. Rory watched the screen with bewilderment, like it was a crime to be viewing the Games on their own.

"Shouldn't we get the others?" asked Rory, but Gale ignored him, watching the screen feverishly. He still clung to the smallest sliver of hope that wouldn't be diminished by the corner of the screen, where Mellark's face was reminding everyone who the Victor was.

Rory sat in the chair beside Gale. He asked,

"Is she okay?" Rory's voice was small, like he didn't want to really be there. After a few moments, he fell into the silence with them, pulling Posy onto his lap.

Katniss stowed some of the poisonous berries in her pocket. The camera froze in on this moment.

They made a big deal about this year's muttations in the commentary. Each mutt in the likeness of a dead tribute, they were the most terrifying beasts he'd ever seen. The sickest one was small and dark, snarling with the brown eyes of that little girl Katniss allied with earlier. They made it to the Cornucopia just in time for the mutts to snap their jaws at her foot. One of them bit in, and she screamed, and the scream would stay with him forever.

Peeta tried to pull her up, and got her halfway there before the Career sneeked up behind him and landed a blow to his head with the butt of the sword. Somehow he made it up the other side of the Cornucopia before them. Peeta fell back and blood sprayed.

Katniss scrabbled up the metal. She had just enough time to get herself over the edge before the Career yanked her up by the hair, and her bow fell to the ground to be torn apart by the mutts. The Career punched her face hard while she tried to grab an arrow from the sheath still on her shoulder. When she did, she drove it into his arm, but he didn't seem to feel it because his other arm went around her neck in a choke hold, almost mechanically. There was a sword in his other hand.

"No," Peeta yelled, words slurring. "Leave her alone."

He tried to get up, but his head was bleeding badly and his leg was useless, and he just stayed lying in the blood watching the sword raise. He raggedly yelled the career's name.

She struggled, kicking, screeching sounds coming from her mouth, one hand hitting and the other snatching at her pocket.

It happened quickly. Too quickly for Gale to cover Prim's eyes. The sword came down into her side while her hand came up to the Career's face. She twisted, her fingers digging deep into the Career's mouth, deep enough that he gagged violently and let her go. The sword came out of her, bright red, and clanged to the floor. It took Gale a second to see that the Career's mouth was bleeding. Another second for him to see that it wasn't blood, it was more purple than red, and it was stained on her hands- on his mouth- Nightlock.

"Oh," Prim whined. "Oh."

She fell to the metal, near where Peeta was lying. Then the Career fell down much in the same way that the Redhead did, with convulsions, but bloodless and clean. Not like Katniss, whose blood was emptying onto the shiny surface of the Cornucopia.

Maybe if the Career had died first, she might have been saved by the hovercraft, and they might have fixed her up. She might have come home, and she might have come back to the woods with him, and they might have hunted together once more, and he might have kissed her under the trees, toasted bread with her by the fireplace. But she died first because the sword had gone deep. She died with he eyes open.

* * *

Katniss was not the first dead body that he'd ever seen. They showed him his father before he was buried, mangled and black with coal like a charred piece of meat.

"You're lucky," Katniss had told him.

"How's that?"

"You got to see him."

He never told Katniss that she was the lucky one, for them never having found her father under all that rock. He never talked to her about the nightmares, the ones where his father became an undead monster, spewing coal dust so thick that Gale would wake up feeling choked. He would have liked to keep his father fresh and alive in his memories, but when he closed his eyes and thought about his Pa, he thought about the body that replaced him. There was nothing left of those coal dusty and calloused hands, his taller-than-trees demeanor, dark eyes that were kind and hard.

He saw the body of Katniss at her burial, inside the wooden box with a white rose in her hands, and she looked so different. The Capitol dusted her off, cleaned her wound, hid it underneath a flowing white gown that Katniss wouldn't have been caught dead in (though she was caught dead in it now).

The burial took place after the homecoming celebration of Peeta. The train platform was flooded with Twelve's miners and merchants alike, bustling with excitement, which was fine because Peeta's homecoming meant food and riches. Only a handful of people looked solemn in the crowd, traders at the Hob who knew Katniss. He wondered what they would miss more; Katniss or her full game bag.

From all the way at the back of the platform, Gale could only see the top of Mellark's blonde head. He didn't watch the post-game interviews, so he didn't know what Mellark looked like now. He only had the lasting image of his face lying in a pool of both Katniss's and his own blood, saying her name over and over as his voice broke and the hovercraft approached.

It wasn't exactly hate he felt for Peeta Mellark. He didn't have a name for it.

The burial was a short ceremony where loved ones would gather around in the graveyard that had already swallowed the bodies of a few hundred children. They dug the hole weeks ago, a gaping spot in the earth where she would stay forever.

He was surprised by the amount of people who came. Girls and boys from school, her neighbors from the Seam, Merchants who traded with her at their doorstep. Madge gave him a sad smile that looked dull on her face with tears.

They all stayed while a Peacekeeper recited the typical speech on sacrifice and bravery, and they cleared out as the box was shut and lowered into the ground. Prim's crying was relentless, and as Rory held her while she sobbed, her mother went to the edge of the grave. It looked like she was going to pitch herself in to be buried with her daughter. Then, after a moment, Sabina turned sharply and took a very long breath.

Hazelle came to her side, stretching her arm around her. They called for the kids, all of them ready to go home and grieve in private. Gale was probably expected to go with them, but he didn't move from his distanced spot facing the grave. When they passed by him, he met Sabina's eyes. They were so dull and sunken. He wondered if she had anything left to give Prim.

When their footsteps receded, he found the world to be quiet. He might have been deaf. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the plant that took him all morning to find in the vast woods. Each step toward the grave felt dreadful. It was worse than that. He could feel her presence under the soil.

He dug a small hole, dirt under his nails, frantic and slow at the same time. If he kept digging, he might find her hand and hold it. He buried the katniss root and covered it with earth. It wouldn't grow here, but he thought only of when she told him about her namesake. He salivated over her description of the dinners made of tubers and duckling, gravy and greens. She said how she always felt rich when they had the thing for which she was named. Her eyes lit up when she told him about it. The katniss root. There was secret pride in her voice. She was always so determined to beat the hunger, so appreciative of those memories, with her voice full of nostalgia and excitement- he loved her from then on.

"What's that?" asked a voice behind him. Gale snapped up, only now feeling the tear tracks on his cheeks. Mellark stood there, eyes red and face haggard. A little ways behind him, the omnipresent camera team stood filming the moment.

Gale waited to speak, considered just turning around and leaving without another word. He would much rather pretend that Peeta Mellark did not exist. Instead he said,

"Katniss root."

Peeta nodded. The wind blew strong at that moment, sending a chill through Gale. He eyed the victor up and down. Peeta Mellark was just another merchant kid from his school who he steadfastly ignored like all merchants, a boy inconsequential to him, a nobody. Why was he what District Twelve got in return for Katniss?

"It should have been you," he found himself saying.

"I know it." The reply was almost immediate. In his voice, there was a degree of longing. His eyes never moved from ground Gale stood on, the fresh earth under which his District partner was.

Gale walked away from the grave, silently promising he'd visit her again soon. The camera men seemed to inch closer when he moved, but he wasn't going to hit Peeta Mellark or scream at him or kill him dead like that arena should have. He brushed past Mellark who was still staring. He was glad not to meet his eyes.

Sometime later, Gale rolled on the soft, wet ground of the woods. He forgot how he'd gotten there exactly, but now he was deep and far into them. If he kept going, could he reach another district? Some place where Katniss never existed. The whole forest _smelled_ like her, the air _tasted_ of her. He couldn't catch his breath, and he didn't know if it was from the exertion or from the gaping hole in his chest that was swallowing up his organs.

He banged his head against the ground, snapping a twig. He hit his face with his fists. He screamed,

"No, no FUCK," and then whispered, "no no no no no no no," like the words might do something to bring her back or erase her completely.

* * *

Three weeks passed without him stepping foot in the woods again.

Now that the Games were over, another year gone, it marked the end of Gale's school career. He wasn't very sentimental about it. His school was a daily joke, the classes just white noise, the lessons useless. History of the Games, of Panem, of technology that was out of his league. Rules and regulations that had already been drilled into him.

A job was waiting for him, and if he just went down to the Justice Building and signed his name, he'd be another one of the early rising coal miners of the district. There would be blackness under his nails and eyes. His back would nearly break down there, pitching axes and rigging mines. The coal would have his lungs eventually, turning them from fleshy pink to brown, black useless things.

He couldn't bring himself to do it just yet. They were getting by alright on the food rations given from the Games, though he hated eating it. It felt like the bags of Capitol brand meat and cheese were drenched in blood. He swore he tasted it.

She never said so, but he knew Hazelle was worried. The crease on her forehead etched itself deeper. She worked her fingers to the bone on the rack still, doing all she could, finding herself suddenly on her own without Gale's weekly game and trading profit, but she never pushed him to go back to being the provider. Maybe it was because she thought he was too fragile at the moment, a thought he laughed off, no matter how true it was.

The problem was that he didn't know what was worse; going down into the mines, or going back to the woods.

So in those weeks that Katniss was dead, Gale's days went a little like this:

He would wake from a slumber, delirious, usually finding that it was past noon. He couldn't dream and he didn't know why. Every night it was the same; he closed his eyes and sleep came, then an instant later, he'd wake, eight hours gone in the blink of his eye. He wished for dreams, for nightmares even. Without them, he might as well be dead in the night.

He would go to the Hob without breakfast, where Sae would take pity on him and sometimes give him a bowl of Stew if he helped scrub the pots. He wasn't scared of the Hob the way he was scared of the woods. There was too much activity, too much fluidity in the traders that frequented the place. Noise and business offered a nice distraction from the thoughts that made his stomach ache.

After the Hob had cleared out, he'd go to Prim's and help her with whatever she needed. Being inside Katniss's house was like wading into ice water, but he would never abandon Prim. If Katniss did have one dying wish, it was that Prim was taken care of.

She was getting by on the rations as well, but soon, she might not have such frequent meals. Sabina still ran the apothecary, from what he could tell, but each time he passed through the Everdeen's threshold, she would excuse herself to tend to the goat or an imaginary chore in the other room. One day, he asked Prim,

"How's your mother doing?"

She shrugged as she penciled in the answers to her homework page.

"Okay, I think."

"She makes you food? Makes sure you get to school?" he asked. It was hypocritical of him to accuse her of negligence since he was no longer providing food for his siblings, no longer walking them to school.

"Yes." And Prim looked at him with narrowed eyes. "I know how to take care of myself, too."

He patted her head.

"I just want to make sure you eat. She-" he broke off, unable to say what he wanted. _She wanted me to make sure you eat._

He would leave and see Sabina through the window, sitting with Prim as soon as he was gone. He could guess why she was avoiding him. It was for the same reason he avoided the woods.

At home, he might eat a bite or two and give the rest of his meal to the kids. His mother would ask him a few questions that he'd hardly register. He would help her do the wash without saying a word, and he would ignore her worried glances until it was dark enough to justify going to bed. He'd slip into that dreamless sleep and wake in the morning to do it all over again, with no idea of how to change it.

One morning at the Hob, Darius was trying to tell a joke to Gale about a turkey and a slag, but he was only half listening as he handed him a bowl of the beaver stew.

"So the turkey turns to the girl and says, 'those aren't giblets!'"

Sae gave a wheezy laugh and shook her head. Gale missed the beat, so his forced laugh was late and not very convincing.

"Go on and git, you ol' wise-ass," Sae, said, shooing Darius with her hand. He lapped up some stew and gave her a disgusting show of the chewed food in his mouth. Like always, she reminded him that she wanted that bowl back as he sauntered away.

Gale hung back on the stool and surveyed the large ramshackle building that held the underground market. Wiley, a man who sold clothing and pelts, was walking toward him from his stand. He had Seam grey eyes, but greying blonde hair. Gale used to sell him whatever pelts they would get from some of the game.

"Hey ho, Gale." He inclined his head.

"Hey ho, Wiley."

"Any good catches lately?"

"Not many, Wiley," Gale replied. Wiley was not the only one who wondered when the game shortage would end.

"I just gotta get preppin' for winter, ya see, and well, I don't know any one else in the district who's got supplies..." Of course this was true, because there were only two poachers in town and one of them was dead.

"You'll be the first to know if I come into any...supplies." He said this meaning to dismiss Wiley, but the old man wasn't hearing it.

"A lot of us here have gone without for a while now, you know. I'm sure we'd all be more than generous if you were back in business again," he said.

"Wiley, you leave that boy alone," Sae pitched in.

Gale was about to tell Sae that it wasn't a problem, that he could handle it, but he was distracted. Over by Ripper's table, he noticed Peeta Mellark's blonde head and coal dustless hands passing Ripper coins. She slid a bottle of white liquor across the table. Odd to see Mellark at the Hob, or any merchant, for that matter. Odder that he was buying Ripper's stock.

Gale pictured Haymitch Abernathy, who had been in the Hob no more than an hour ago making the exact same purchase.

So Mellark was going drown his sorrows? Did he think it was that easy? Gale'd considered it himsef, but he knew that Katniss would have killed him twice if he became a drunkard.

But Katniss coudn't kill anything anymore. She couldn't make any judgments of the sort. He didn't know what the purpose of her death was, but it sure as hell wasn't for there to be more wasted District men wandering the streets.

"Hey," he shouted across to Ripper. He slid out from behind the table and made a beeline toward her.

Peeta's looked up when he saw Gale encroaching upon him. He was holding the white liquor in his hand, white knuckled. Almost everyone in the Hob turned their heads, all of them just realizing that the victor was here.

"Put that back," he ordered, pointing to the liquor. He didn't make a movement, so Gale grabbed the bottle from Peeta's fist and slammed it on the table hard enough that it shattered and spilled. The smell of it burned his nostrils.

"Mind your own, Hawthorne," said Ripper, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Peeta's eyes as they struggled to be harder. His jaw was set, but the facade was translucent.

"What's it to you, anyhow?" he asked Gale, voice low and quiet.

Heat and anger flared up in his chest. He gritted his teeth, balled his hands into fists at his side.

"You don't get an easy out."

Peeta's face dropped momentarily, revealing a deep, sad expression that was not so easily hidden. A second later, the face was gone, replaced by anger. He shoved Gale's chest and Gale tripped backward one step.

"Why do you care what I do?"

It was a good question, he had to admit, and the answer was more complicated than the one he gave while pushing Peeta's chest back.

"Because _she,"_ shove, "didn't die," shove, "so that you could turn into Haymitch fucking Abernathy," shove.

Peeta's jaw looked like it was going to unhinge. He stepped forward, pushing Gale back with a force.

"You don't know anything about _why she died_ ," he yelled.

And Gale swung at him, fist colliding with nose, cartilage crunching. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, and Mellark was on top of him, holding his neck with both hands like he was going to choke Gale, but he didn't. He looked into his eyes to see what was there, trying to figure out why he wouldn't squeeze his neck, just choke the life out of him. His fingers stayed slack. Gale kicked to get him off, but it didn't do anything to move Peeta's heavy fame.

After a moment, someone pulled him off and another someone was hauling Gale to his feet. Darius held Peeta by the arms, and a couple of men restrained Gale as he spit out curses and threats, struggling for another swing at him. His anger roared like a beast that had been pent up, starving more than the Seam brats in winter.

"You better clear out, Peeta," someone said. Peeta shook out of Darius's arms, brushing himself off. Blood ran in rivers from his nose all the way down to his neck. It stained his shirt red. He stared at Gale for a long time, and so did all the vendors of the Hob, before he disappeared behind the crowd, slipping out of the door as Gale huffed and puffed and watched after him. Like letting a deer run off without making the kill.

"Geroffme," he growled to the men holding his arms. They let him go, and he stumbled forward.

Darius approached him like he was wild animal. His hand was protectively on the baton on his belt, and it must have been the first time he ever thought about using it.

"You calm?" he asked. He didn't condescend to answer. "It ain't like you, sticking your nose in other people's business."

"Are you gonna arrest me or what?" Gale spat.

Darius raised his eyebrows. He knew Darius didn't have it in him to send him to the whipping post. Hob men didn't betray each other so easily. He just stepped out of the way, saying,

"Stay the hell away from Peeta Mellark."

* * *

That night, he went back to the woods and it hurt like he feared it would.

In the cover of darkness, he cried against a tree while ignoring his hunger. He had not eaten since yesterday morning at the Hob. He had not cried since they buried her.

Pieces of Gale were starting to float out of him, starting to drift up. He could catch them and put them back in their place, but they wouldn't stay. He lost his gravitational pull when she died. It was the thing that held everything down.

When he closed his eyes and breathed in the forest, he saw the red apple blood that seemed to flow from her. He saw his father's empty shell, dead eyes in his mind, and then her dead eyes and white flowing death dress. He heard the dying words that were some other boy's name.

Peeta Mellark everywhere; the ghost he couldn't get rid of. Even his blood had dripped onto his cheek when he was choking him and now it was smeared on his fingers.

Had the situations been reversed, and Gale was the tribute, would he have been the star-crossed boy from District Twelve? Would he partner up, playing out a romance for the world to see? Risking his life, his important fucking life, so that his partner could live? Even if Katniss was waiting for him, watching him at home?

He hated her for it. He hated her for not living.

Later, he climbed under the dead electrical fence and back onto the coal covered streets. Delirium and ,violence under his belt, he wondered if maybe he was going mad. It happened sometimes. There was an older guy who lost himself down in the mines a few years back, tried blowing up the entire team until someone was forced to hit him with a pickaxe. Gale wanted to know who was going to bring the hammer down on his head.

He didn't bother knocking on Prim's door. She looked up from her small barrel of goat milk and weakly smiled. Prim didn't smile much these days.

"I need to borrow something, Prim."

"Okay," she said.

"Can I look through your mom's supplies?"

Prim bit her lower lip, but stood up to lead him over to the shelves in the small kitchen area. The apothecary was better stocked than any food pantry of theirs might be. Gale saw what he was looking for and picked the bottle up. He uncorked it to smell it, to make sure it was just white liquor, and his nostrils burned.

"What are you going to do with that?" asked Prim's small voice.

"It's not for me. I just...owe someone." He shoved the bottle in his back pocket. "I'll get you more," he said, though he didn't know how he would afford it.

Prim looked at him with maybe a speck of skepticism, but she was not one to voice objections.

"Do you need anything?" he asked for good measure.

She shook her head. He gave her shoulder a gentle shove and was led to the door. In the threshold, she grabbed his shirt to stop him.

"Rory told me you're never home anymore," she said.

"Did he?" His heart started the hammer inside his chest. The pieces of him, in particular, his family floated out into the thick autumn air.

"Where do you go when you're not at home?" Her voice trembled, timid, small, baby-bird girl.

"I go nowhere, Primrose."

But that night he went somewhere. That night, his feet led him to the alien row of houses called Victor's Village. Most of the large homes were black and dark, with an abandoned quality. One house had a bit of litter and a small fledgling of geese trotting in the yard, and the other occupied house had a single light on in the far right window.

He picked that one. Even if Mellark didn't answer, he could always pass the liquor off to Haymitch and call it a day.

No flowers in the garden. No warm welcoming mat. He tried to peer inside the window, but there was nothing to see, no lights. He knocked twice.

He came to the door wearing a different shirt, one without blood on it. His eyes and nose were bruised, probably broken, grisly blue and purple .Gale remembered hearing his fist collide with it, and he felt a little sick.

Peeta sagged against the doorway, closing his eyes and sighing like Gale was a minor annoyance; a flea he couldn't kill.

"I brought you this," Gale said to fill he silence. He opened his eyes and glanced at the outstretched bottle.

"I don't want it."

"Look, it's only fair. I smashed the one you paid for."

"I can afford it."

Gale laughed for some reason. It was an odd sound, a sharp bark of a thing. He had not laughed in weeks, so the moment struck a chord in him. But then the silence after grew awkward, so Gale hardened himself and said,

"Just take it."

"Why don't you smash it over my head or something?" Peeta said. It was probably supposed to be a joke, but it didn't sound funny when it was coming from a bruised face.

They both stood there unwavering until Gale said,

"I think I need a drink."

Peeta took the bottle, and Gale felt his strangely smooth fingers touch the rough calluses of his own hand. He turned the bottle over and over, glancing at Gale, at the bottle, at Gale. He opened the door a bit wider.

"Come in, then."

At this moment, Gale had the choice to leave, to spare himself. Something made him pass through the threshold, something deep and buried inside, embedded in him like the the coal down in the mines.

The house was a dark cave devoid of light, but with adjusted eyes, he saw that it was in perfect condition. Inside, the surfaces were clean. Counters bare, walls bare, furniture not an inch out of place. Gale expected disarray, apathy, filth. He expected Mellark's house to be as messy as his life, but it was spotless, like no one lived here at all.

"Nice place," he commented, and Peeta grunted, not agreeing or disagreeing.

A low fire was dying in the living area so that shadows filled the room. Gale stood in the kitchen, a little lost for words, a little lost in general.

"So where's your family?"

"They stayed at the bakery."

Peeta walked to a pantry and retrieved a few glasses. They clinked on the counter, the cork popped from the bottle, and the liquid ran in a deathly stream.

Gale drank liquor with a few school kids when he was younger. It made him vomit up the meagre meal in his belly, made him go hungry and thirsty for a whole day, and since then he vowed he wouldn't drink again. As Peeta slid him the glass, eyeing him with suspicion, he felt the promise break.

"I'm not sure who to toast to," Peeta confessed.

"Don't toast to her. She'd wring your neck."

"I deserve it anyway," Peeta said after a moment, raising the glass. "So here's to her."

They clinked and swallowed down the alcohol, like lava down the throat. Gale coughed, shook his head, curbed the sudden warmth in his belly. He set the glass down.

"Another?"

Peeta gave him a heavy look, one that was loaded with something, but Gale didn't know what. He poured them a second drink and didn't toast before swallowing it down again.

"I'm sorry I hit you," Gale blurted out. The low lighting made the bruises on his face even look even angrier.

"You're not," Peeta said through a dark chuckle. "You've been wanting to hit me for a while now."

"Since I saw you two holding hands. At the Tribute Parade," he said.

"Yeah." He sucked in a sharp breath. "That was mostly for the cameras, anyway."

Gale helped himself to a third drink as the fire ate away the knot in his stomach. Peeta tapped his glass and Gale poured him one as well.

"Was it all for the cameras?" he asked.

Peeta leaned his elbows down onto the counter and Gale mimicked him, leaning in close, so not to miss a word. He felt he was learning secrets, answers to important questions, like he was finally joining the conspiracy. Peeta brushed his hand over his face.

"I don't know if it was real or not real."

It wasn't good enough.

"But did you think she loved you?" Gale asked. He didn't even try to mask the urgency. Peeta met his eyes, looked at him like he was crazy. He shook his head a few times.

"Did you think she loved _you_?" Peeta asked. "Everyone in the Capitol thinks you're her cousin. But that's not true, is it?"

"I was never her cousin," Gale said, hating the label. He could remember when they wanted to interview him for the Games. The freakshow parading into the Seam, asking all these questions. He tried to refuse , but masked threats and a persistent Effie Trinket subdued him into sitting down in front of he weird camera men who wore gear that made them look like giant insects. He tried to brush them off with curt answers and angry looks. They made the interview look decent on television with their tricky camera editing. He looked just like her cousin, their Seam eyes and coal-dark hair.

Peeta dropped his chin into his hand and said sadly,

"You were too handsome. It wasn't helping our star-crossed lovers story."

"We were never together like that." Gale hated to say it despite how true it was. He hated how true it was. "If I had more time...maybe .."

"I'm sorry," Peeta said.

Gale pushed himself from the counter an ran his hands through his hair frantically.

"It's just...I just don't understand it."

"Understand what?" Peeta's voice never changed, stayed monotonous while Gale's reached another octave.

"I don't understand why she would die for _you._ "

When Peeta shook his head again, Gale got the impression that he was asking the wrong questions, but the dead girl had woven some kind of tangled mess in his head, and he just wanted to know why she gave up on District Twelve, her sister, and him. She promised she would do everything she could to come home, so why wasn't she home? Why couldn't she have shot everyone off from the top of a tall tree? She would be the one with him in the victor's house. She would make the woods beautiful again

"What you don't get is," Peeta said slowly. "Is the arena. It doesn't matter if everyone in there wants you dead, you still...you still don't want to be alone. I wished she would come and she did."

"She would have lived if she stayed by herself."

"I know. But we thought there could be two Victors. We thought we could go home."

"You're home now," Gale said. He didn't know what he meant by it.

Peeta looked at his feet shamefully, took a long breath, and Gale decided to occupy the silence by having another drink. This time, he just took a swig from the bottle, then passed it to Peeta.

"She didn't die for me," Peeta said. "It's just what happens in the Games."

After a moment, Gale took the bottle back and sipped it. He was getting used to the taste.

"I know," he whispered.

They didn't talk about the Games, or Katniss, or anything after that. The drink made his footsteps land strangely in front of him. He walked around, following Peeta up a flight of stairs, falling into the wall a few times. It was darker than downstairs without the fire tricking his eyes, but he could see the white of Peeta's shirt in front of him so he followed. With a jaded sense of time, it seemed to take hours before they were at the end of the hall. Peeta opened a door and the light turned on.

So this was where he was keeping the mess.

Everywhere, paint stained the walls and the floor. Canvases were thrown, some in tact, some ripped from their frames. Splinters of wood were difficult to sidestep. Full jars of color were thrown around, emptying and dried on the floor into puddles that looked like spilled milk and spilled blood. Gale squinted, crouching down to pick up one of the mostly in tact paintings. It was Katniss with half her face buried against a sleeping bag. This was what Peeta saw when he was lying next to her in the cave. Gale dreamed of this painting, of what it would be like to watch her sleep from so close.

He felt Peeta's warm breath behind him, on his shoulder.

"Did you ever get to kiss her?" Peeta asked.

"No. What was it like?"

"Like...the forest. Like drinking from a stream in a forest."

Katniss was the woods and the stream and the arrows and the wild animal all wrapped in one. What would it be like to taste that?

He felt Peeta bring up the bottle, tipping the last of he drink into his mouth. Gale lowered the painting, looked around at the other ruined ones. There were pictures of death and blood, the Cornucopia, the cave, and Katniss, Katniss everywhere, her dead eyes watching them.

"You painted all these?"

Peeta sighed from behind him still, and he leaned his forehead to rest between Gale's shoulder blades. Gale didn't even jump at the feeling. The weight settled there. Peeta breathed hot breath on his back. He said,

"I dream about it every night."

And Gale said,

"I can't dream at all."

He left Peeta in the painting room, walking blindly through the uncharted house again. He ducked into a bathroom to take a piss. After, he stared into the mirror at his reflection, seeing himself through the fuzzy vision of drunkenness. Peeta's footsteps sounded outside in the hallway. They walked past and reminded him he wasn't alone.

How did he even get here?

A few minutes later, he felt even more drunk. He felt the fire in his stomach turn to fire in his veins, in his head.

Walking through the Victor's house, the endless hallway, he found a clean room, one with a bed in it. His brain briefly registered that Peeta must be the dark figure on top of it. All the same, he was suddenly tired, eyes itching for sleep. His feet led him clumsily to the bed and he sank into it.

Gale rested against the feathery pillow under his head, the alien softness of the mattress, the weight of someone much larger than Posy beside him. Head spinning, he turned and faced the left side. Blue eyes were watching him.

Seam eyes were grey. It was the only color that was ever prominent in his part of the district.

Yet here were blue eyes.

That night he dreamed of the blue oceans of District Four, the one's he only saw on television. He dreamed of a starfish curling around him. It was stuck in between his shoulder blades. He dreamed he was dreaming, and the dreams went deeper than that. He would wake to find himself in another dream, then wake again to the same thing like waves coming to the shore and being pulled back again. Always blue oceans and blue skies as the night wore on.

In the morning, he woke first to untangle himself from the sheets and the mysterious limbs. His head pounded, his limbs shook with dehydration, a feeling he'd known from the summer months. It took a few nauseous seconds for his head to clear enough to notice the brightly lit room he was in was not his home.

And then his thoughts went to the dream that was starting to get foggy. He closed his eyes and _remembered,_ forcing the dream back to the front of his mind so that it wouldn't slip away because it was the first thing he'd dreamed in weeks.

Peeta woke, but stayed with his head half resting on the pillow.

Gale glanced down at him. It was odd that they were sharing the bed, and he hardy remembered getting here last night, but before he could say anything about it, Peeta said,

"No nightmares."

* * *

In those weeks that Peeta Mellark became a curse on him, Gale's days went a little like this:

He would hunt because he had to. Reluctantly, he'd venture into the woods to set his snares early. He'd hike around, chewing the bread that Peeta always left on the counter for him. Sometimes, he'd get lucky and shoot a pheasant or a turkey, but most days he returned with squirrels and rabbits in his bag. Again, he wasted no time in the woods. There was nothing he loved about them anymore.

He made his doorstep rounds, getting this or that from whoever needed squirrels. Then it was to the Hob, where he was receiving generous payments from the traders who'd missed the taste of wild game in the last month. Sae would give him stew which he could now pay for with bits of squirrels and turkeys.

Afterward, he'd let himself into the house where his mother was working the rack. She would ask him how his day went, and nothing more, since he stopped answering her heavy questions, like,

 _"Where have you been sleeping?"_ and _"What are you doing, Gale?"_

He would be pleasant with his mother, always, even if her looks made him clench his fists. When his father died, he became more than her son, more than a brother to the kids. She knew it and he knew it, and it made them special like Katniss was special to Prim. So maybe Hazelle was very hurt by his absence, but Gale couldn't keep on pretending that he was the same. He wouldn't pretend that he could sleep easily next to his siblings in the bed. He didn't try to fix anything, and he knew that, but didn't know how to start.

He would clean the animals alone, lay them out for his mother to cook for dinner. The kids would come home from school, happy to see him, climbing on him and begging to play. They rambled about the goings on of school and what this person said to that person in their lesson. Except Rory. Rory would give Gale a dark look and go outside to avoid him.

Gale wouldn't try to fix that, either.

When it was dinner time, he would slip out the back door without really saying goodbye. He would walk the few narrow Seam streets, stopping by Prim's to deliver a meal. He was teaching her how to clean game, a task she found horrible but necessary. It was odd to see Prim with her hands on a knife. She made a bloody hack job of the last squirrel. Her hands shook so much she couldn't keep the cut steady. And when he asked her if she wanted to stop, she shook her head vehemently.

"No, I have to learn."

By then it would be dark, and Gale's stomach would rumble for dinner. He would walk up the main artery through District Twelve, past the unused whipping post, the rarely entered butcher shop. Sometimes the butcher would be outside, pulling on a pipe, and he'd give Gale a dirty look as he passed.

Victor's Village was still formidable. He would drag his feet until Peeta's house came into view and look up at it with the sense that everything was still a dream.

He didn't have to knock. He always kicked off his shoes and rested his coat on the chair by the door. Sometimes Peeta was baking or cooking, sometimes he was nowhere to be seen. On those nights, Gale would prepare a small meal himself. It didn't matter if Peeta was home or not, there was always bread. Eventually he would come out from whatever hiding spot he was in, or come home from whatever place he was visiting, and they would eat together.

Usually it was standing over the counter. Sometimes there was chatter, and Peeta would tell him a few things about this or that, but most nights they were just quiet and thankful for the food.

"You should let me pay you for this," Gale said one night, his mouth full of sunflower bread. Sunflower seeds were hard to come by, having been shipped from Eleven, he knew the price was high.

"I don't need your money." Peeta surely didn't mean to sound insulting, but Gale didn't like the tone.

"Well, I don't need your charity." He threw down his last piece of bread.

Peeta groaned. When he accepted food from him, Gale had that uncomfortable feeling in his gut similar to what he felt when putting his name down for tesserae. Every night they would eat together, always Peeta's food. With every free bite, the discomfort grew, but he didn't mention it too often for fear of disrupting the

routine. And what a strange routine it was.

When dinner was finished, Peeta would light a fire. Gale always cleaned the dishes, dried them, stacked them away so that everything was impeccable again. He tried to make himself scarce.

They would sit by the fire. He would sharpen his arrows, practice his snares, tie knots and play with bones. Peeta read books or sketched unknowable things with a charcoal pencil in a book. He didn't ask to see the drawings, and Peeta never offered to show him.

They never drank the white liquor again.

Later in the night, the ascent to the second floor would be the most palpable moment for Gale. Avoiding touching, avoiding eye contact, they'd trudge up the stairs and through the hallway. Now sober, the hallway wasn't nearly as endless as he'd imagined. Peeta's bedroom was the farthest room.

Going to bed with Peeta Mellark should have made his stomach ache. It should have sent alarms through his head like the ones they sounded during mining accidents. He would strip down to his underclothes while Peeta threw on a nightshirt, and he'd sink into the bed that had become more familiar than his own. With his eyes closed, he'd feel Peeta's weight shift on the mattress, the covers draw up, and he'd twist a bit into the natural curve of two bodies close together. Legs thrown over each other, arms splayed this way or that way. They didn't say goodnight, they just fell asleep like that. And Gale's stomach never ached. It was the one moment in the day, before slipping into unconsciousness, that his chest relaxed, and the gaping hole there filled up with Peeta's snores and the promise of dreams.

He always dreamed now.

* * *

One night, Gale returned from town with a few turkey legs that he'd managed to hold onto for the day. If he wasn't paying for the food, then he could at least contribute to the meal.

Peeta was not in the kitchen; nothing new. He wondered which room he was holed up in, or if he was over at Haymitch's, or down at the graveyard visiting her. He moved around the kitchen, grabbing things, knowing where the spices were and where knives were stored as if it was his own kitchen. He was about to start frying the turkey when he heard a loud bang from above him.

His eyes went to the ceiling. Another crash, another bang and stomping that sounded like rolling thunder.

Then yelling, an unfamiliar scream. Peeta didn't yell. He was always so calm.

Abandoning the turkey, he took the stairs two at a time. He remembered the drunken night in the room with the paintings, the room with Katniss everywhere. Though it had been a month of their arrangement, he never step foot in there again. He avoided it, calling it the room of horrors. So his hand hesitated when he went to turn the knob, but he heard another choke from inside, a kind of sob that he couldn't ignore. He opened the door and forgot to be tentative. He forgot that Peeta probably wanted to be alone and probably _needed_ to be alone while he was in there, but Gale hated the sounds. Strangled animal cries.

Peeta stood, chest heaving in the center of the room. His hands were dripping blood- but he saw after a fearful second that it wasn't blood. It was paint. The brush in his other hand looked like it had been through hell. On the easel sat the latest painting of a long gash, a wound on the side of someone's body, clotted with dark fabric. Katniss's blood.

"What are you doing?" he asked him.

Peeta didn't answer. His breath hitched, a sob caught in his throat.

Gale walked toward him as gently as he could. He was a startled deer. He was afraid to sending him running. He looked from the horrible painting to Peeta, and reached his hand out. He made hi m let go of the brush and it fell to the already stained ground.

"Stop," Gale whispered.

The sound that escaped Peeta's lips was so pathetic, so small. He pulled on Peeta's neck, forcing his face into the crook of his own shoulder. Peeta's hands went around him. They pulled down Gale's back as he cried. They grabbed at him, staining red onto his cheek and his neck, red handprints all over his chest. Gale gripped him tighter and tighter, like he was holding him together.

He didn't know how he ended up here. Holding Peeta Mellark as he cried. The air was so tense and so thick that he couldn't escape it. The hate and resentment dissipated for as the poor victor in his arms tied a knot that connected them. He couldn't let go of him.

"Can we just sleep?," he whispered in Gale's ear.

"Yeah," he mumbled.

Peeta stopped making the awful sounds by the time they got to the bedroom. Gale didn't turn on the light, but the window had the curtains drawn and moonlight was enough. He pressed Peeta onto the bed, noticing red paint stained them both. He supposed it didn't really matter.

He slipped out of his shirt, and where he'd normally fold it, put it in a neat pile on the chair opposite the bed, he just let it fall to the ground. Peeta sat hunched on the edge of the bed with the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes. Still seeing the horrors and the blood.

Gale crouched down, so much taller than him, he had to kneel to be at equal height.

"Give me your shirt," he said, but Peeta didn't listen. He kept his eyes covered. Gale sighed softly, reaching out to pull the shirt off Peeta's back himself. "It's all covered in paint."

It was when he got close that Peeta reached out for him, pulled him back into that embrace with his head in the crook of Gale's shoulder. He didn't feel tears this time, just hot breath making his skin sweat on that spot. He felt the warmth of what could only be lips on his collarbone.

His stomach did a flip, but it didn't seem to protest. Gale wondered what that meant. He didn't say anything as Peeta's lips traveled north to his neck. His jaw. His ear. His cheek. His lips.

And they were kissing.

Gale was used to kissing. He kissed lots of girls behind the school, in the slag heap, in their own bedrooms. He felt breasts and touched the soft spot between a girl's legs. The last kiss he felt was Madge Undersee's small lips, but his was not like kissing Madge, who had been strawberry sweet and soft. This was hard. Stubble and tongues, breath and teeth. He liked this better, it made his stomach boil in a way that wasn't really pleasant, but not bad. He reacted to it, became a part of the push and pull that went along with tangling lips.

He knew there was a difference between kissing boys and kissing girls. The merchants who watched more Capitol TV than him were seen in the halls of school sometimes, two boys with their arms looped together, two girls holding hands. The Seam was a bit different. If rumors sprang up that two boys or two girls were kissing in the slag heap, the other kids would murmur about it like it was a character flaw. The old men and women would give them strange looks, say that in the old ways, only boys and girls were meant to do that. They said that two boys and two girls was a Capitol thing.

When they stopped, Peeta put his head back on Gale's shoulder, and exhaled against him.

Peeta did not taste like a stream in the forest. He wasn't a body of water at all, not a blue ocean or a pond. He was hard and solid, earthy like dandelion soup, hot and thick in his mouth.

They slept in the bed, in the same tangle as every night, but now Peeta kept his head closer to Gale's. Peeta looked at him for a long time, red rimmed eyes intent on his, but they didn't kiss again. He was asleep in a matter of minutes, eyes finally slipping shut. Gale's fingers shook as he touched his own face, his whole body tight and tense. It took him a while to fall asleep, and when he did, he dreamed the kiss again and again. His subconscious didn't even have the decency to twist the memory into something else.

* * *

In the morning, Gale woke to an empty bed.

It was cold, the autumn light was pale in the room, and he was hard. With a groan, he shifted his hips. Only wearing undershorts, his hips were exposed, and pressed down on his erection, palming it through the fabric with an absent mind.

There was nothing to be excited about, really.

Whatever was going on was severely fucked up and he knew it.

Hunger was something he was accustomed to. He was used to those pangs, to the rumble underneath the emptiness. Gale used to be hungry like that until he went into the woods. It was a kind of hunger that was making him hard, a different kind off starvation that he would feel when Katniss wiped sweat from her neck or puckered her lips accidentally. It was a familiar ache.

The bed felt cold as a breeze blew in through the open window. His hands stopped moving on himself long enough that he went soft. He couldn't stay in the bed all day, he couldn't avoid anything, he'd have to hunt and carry on.

His clothes weren't where he left them on the floor. They were gone and so were Peeta's. Confused, he left the bedroom. Goose bumps raised on his skin as the draft hit his nakedness. He slipped down the stairs in an effort to be quiet.

Peeta stood at the sink of the kitchen with the tap running. On the counter beside him were several soaps and cleaning supplies. He rubbed at a shirt with vigor, a brush scraping against the fabric. It was Gale's shirt. When he lifted it up, he saw the pale red lines of handprints on the back; the place that Peeta held onto when he found him last night.

"Just toss it," he told him.

Peeta looked up at him with surprise. His eyes were tired, deep set bags darkening underneath. He didn't hear him coming down the stairs. Gale moved into the kitchen to shut off the loud tap, feeling that it was a waste of water.

"I ruined it," Peeta said, dropping the wet thing in the sink.

"Make some dish rags out of it, then."

There was bread on the table. A loaf of dark cinnamon rye filled the air with the spicy scent. Gale's mouth watered and Peeta seemed to notice he was looking at it. He went into a drawer and pulled a knife, began slicing it into thick pieces. They smothered it in precious butter and sweet jam.

They ate against the counter as they normally did, no chatter, mouths full. Gale knew what they were both thinking of, but it seemed custom to not speak about it at all. They were both very good at keeping up facades.

"You really should let me pay you for this," Gale said after a minute. The bread was delicious. Two and a half months ago, cinnamon rye would have been a pipe dream.

When Peeta looked up, he looked like he wanted to say something.

"What?" Gale asked.

"The company...is enough." Peeta's eyes seemed to glaze over.

That day, Gale didn't leave to hunt. He didn't check on his family, Prim, or any of his customers. Peeta loaned him a shirt that was a bit too small and he decided that today, they would clean out the room of horrors. Peeta looked shell shocked when he suggested it.

"You can't leave it like that," he told him.

"I don't want-" Peeta tried, but Gale cut him off.

"If you're going to paint her, you have to do her justice. She can't be...lying on the ground all ripped up like that."

They spent the afternoon clearing out the room. First collecting the ruined things, the busted wooden frames. They put them in a pile in the backyard to burn later. Then Peeta very carefully saved the few paintings that he hadn't destroyed yet; a portrait of Rue with the flowers around her head; the muttated eyes of the dog that was meant to be Glimmer. His hands shook.

Gale mopped all the paint as best he could, but the floor was still a splattered mess that would stay that way forever. It almost looked interesting.

He watched to see if Peeta would do anything- cry, scream, cover his eyes, or kiss him, but he just did his work quietly. His eyes lingered on a particular portrait against the wall. It was Katniss, her face smiling shyly in the dim light of the cave. Gale came up behind him to look at it closer. It was a beautiful portrait of her. It was all Katniss, the way he remembered her, always smiling uneasily.

"You're good at this," he said. "That's almost perfect."

Peeta breathed in a bit of air, a shallow breath.

"Almost," he said.

They burned the broken frames and canvases when it got dark. It was a small fire in the backyard that made a lot of smoke. Smoke made Gale nervous. It made him think of the billows that came with the mine explosion. The whole town stank of smoke for weeks after the accident.

They stood side by side, watching the flames, and Gale was sure both of them were trying not to think about The Girl on Fire.

Haymitch stumbled out of his house at one point to investigate the smell. He kicked a goose and cursed at it when it got in his way, honking at him and disturbing the quiet. He came near and Gale could smell the liquor seeping out of his pores. He shifted uncomfortably under the drunk's gaze. Once or twice, they'd ran into each other at the Hob. He sold him some rabbit once, he thought.

"What are you doing here?" he asked accusingly. Peeta didn't try to help. His eyes were glued to the burning pile.

"Having a fire." Gale tried not to look at him in the eyes, as if he might give himself away. He wasn't sure how good he was at lying.

"Well, I can see that." Haymitch sniffed the air.

The conversation died down as the fire did. Peeta waited until the las of the wood was a charred ember, and then he turned around and walked back into the house. Gale was left with Haymitch and his stink. After a long minute, where neither of them said anything, Haymitch simply stalked away to return to his house as well, and presumably, his booze.

Inside, the lights were already turned off, the first floor quiet.

Peeta was already in bed.

Gale did what he always did, removing his clothes, folding them, putting them in a pile, and twisting into the covers. He could tell by Peeta's breathing that he wasn't asleep yet. Gale wanted to say something, but instead he just turned his head where Peeta's was facing him. Carefully, he kissed him.

His lips were colder against Gale's, but then it was quicker. tongues slid against each other, tasted like cinnamon and sour breath. Peeta made a sound in the back of his throat. The kiss was sweetness, soothing, trickling down his spine to the the lake of sadness. It soaked up the sadness while they breathed against each other, fighting for air and not wanting to let go.

When he did let go, Gale only let himself have one moment to catch his breath. Peeta looked at him with a kind of confusion. He smashed their lips together again and it wasn't enough.

There were hands on him. Hands all over him. They smoothed the line of his back, touched his neck, his hair, his face. Gale didn't know what to do with his own hands, so he held Peeta's head. This way he could tip it back to reach deeper in his mouth as deep as he could go. It still wasn't enough. He pressed him into the bed, he ground himself into him, the fabric of Peeta's shirt smooth against his chest. He couldn't be any closer, but he pressed on and on, hoping that he might get swallowed up entirely.

Everything stopped when he felt his pelvis slide with Peeta's, when he felt that Peeta was hard. They both were hard. They both felt it.

Gale stopped kissing him. They froze, chests heaving for air. There just wasn't enough air.

And because it made him feel better, and because it felt good, Gale pressed his pelvis to Peeta's again and shifted. He kissed him and kissed him and their hips did the same sort of dance, restless for relief. Gale groaned when his dick slid across Peeta's through the barrier of their shorts. It wasn't enough, it was never enough.

He didn't stop to think about what he was doing, he was just lost in heat of it. Something instinctual made him reach down under his shorts, and grab his himself. His hand was caught between Peeta and himself.

And he felt Peeta do the same. Both of them moved on themselves as they frantically kissed, and the wetness of the kiss made Gale ache from deep in his abdomen.

At some point, it wasn't his own hand in between his legs. It became a thick, Capitol-smooth baker's hand. They were larger than any girl's had ever been, taking all of Gale in one grip. He noted the difference, but was too far gone to feel any worry about it. Nothing really existed except the feeling that kept coming in waves. He was close. It felt like pure electricity running through him and making his chest puff and heave.

Peeta accidentally caught Gale's lower lip between his teeth and it made him come.

"Fuck," he hissed against Peeta's forehead. He pulsed. An evangelical zeal seemed to make his chest _cry_ out as everything and everything burst from his pores. All the wrongness burst and rained down on them as he came and went, his body arched, his eyes watering.

"Fuck," he said again, drawing the word out.

Peeta shifted his hips, still hard, still breathing rapidly.

Gale was not fearful, not even embarrassed that his boxers and stomach were damp with himself. He pressed his bare hips to Peeta's clothed ones and slid down Peeta's shorts so that he could feel all the warmth radiating against him. He pressed against him again, made his hips buck. The only dick he knew was his own, but it couldn't be that different.

He touched Peeta with his hand and Peeta sucked in air through his teeth. His own hands were rough and calloused against the silky thing in his fingers. He wondered if Peeta used to have scars on his hands before the Capitol smoothed him down. He noticed that there was no hair on Peeta either, not like Gale who had never shaved an inch of himself before. Peeta's cock was as smooth as the palms of his hands.

"Does it feel good?" he asked in a whisper. Their foreheads stuck together with sweat.

"Yesss," Peeta hissed. Gale's hand moved more rapidly. "You make it feel so much...so much...better."

Gale put his tongue inside his mouth. He licked and sucked and tried his best to do whatever it was that send him off the edge. He wanted Peeta to feel the elation; he wanted the weight off them both.

When his thumb brushed over the most sensitive spot, Peeta grunted and came, squeezing Gale's hip and kissing him one more time.

"You make it better," he gasped again as he relaxed.

* * *

For a while, not much changed. They spent their days occupying their hands, setting snares, baking bread, skinning deer, painting pictures.

Gale got curious one night, and tried to catch a glimpse of what Peeta was drawing in that sketchbook of his. Peeta raised his eyebrow and angled the book away.

"What? I've seen your pictures," Gale said. He scooted closer to him on the rug.

"This is different."

Gale didn't understand how, but he let it go and returned to the hide of deer that he was trying to dry and flatten.

At night, they curled into each other. They would no longer sleep apart. Gale was taller, so he naturally fit around Peeta, knees bent inside his, arm bracing him to his chest. Peeta seemed to like it this way. Peeta would usually fall asleep first with his lips open against the skin of Gale's arm. Sometimes he drooled, but Gale didn't care. He would look at the line of Peeta's silhouette, bundled and snoring like a wounded animal, and feel that instinctual pull to protect him.

It was like when he found her in the woods all those years ago, a sprite, a skinny whip of a thing, arms so awkward on that oversized bow. He wanted to intimidate her, and then he wanted to protect her.

But of course, they had always protected each other.

Gale wasn't sure what Peeta was protecting him from.

On a cold early winter night, Gale woke up for an inexplicable reason. He laid there for a while, blinking, alternating from looking out the window and looking over at the mess of blonde hair on the pillow. An hour passed and he didn't fall asleep again.

Slowly, he extracted himself from the sheets, tip-toeing to the bathroom. In the mirror, he saw the shell of himself. For all intents and purposes, he was still Gale Hawthorne. Nothing much had changed except the length of his hair which Greasy Sae cut for him last week.

He wouldn't begin to list the things that were different about him. None of them could be seen in a mirror.

Suddenly, a noise cut abruptly through the silence; Peeta's strangled, sleepy voice

"Stop it," it called.

Gale slipped out of the bathroom and back into the bedroom where Peeta was flailing his arms in several directions. After a moment, he sat up, wild-eyed and panting. Already sweat made his forehead sheeny in the little bit of light coming through the window. He sat back and breathed for a moment, pressed his hands to his eyes and rubbed them. The nightmare was slipping away, but Gale saw him shaking with fear and anxiety.

"Hey," Gale said. He crawled back into the bed where it was feverishly warm

"I thought- I thought-" he gasped.

"It was just a dream." Gale awoke from many nightmares, but never screaming like this. It made his heart race.

Peeta relaxed against the headboard, trying to calm his breathing. He took a few large breaths, running his hands over his face again and again. Gale reached for him to touch his hair softly like he might break him if he was too harsh.

"I woke up alone," Peeta said quietly.

"I'm sorry."

It was less than a whisper when Peeta said,

"I need you here."

Gale touched Peeta's chest, smooth and sweaty. He rubbed circles into it, leaned in to kiss the middle of it where his lungs were inflating. He'd never put his lips here. He kissed it again slowly, wetly. He kissed from one side to the other. His skin was salty tasting and he liked it.

He tried to figure out the reasons for why he was here and still doing this when it was probably wrong. But when Peeta told him he needed him, Gale understood. The only person who ever needed him was Katniss, for their weekly hunting days, for his company. His siblings only needed him for his game and provisions.

Peeta needed him for other, unknowable reasons. Maybe Gale needed him, too.

If they shifted the pieces of themselves together, they were almost fine. They were almost something. They weren't just the ashes of what the Girl on Fire left behind.

He kissed his stomach, feeling Peeta's hands as they rubbed through his hair slowly. Gale nervously kissed down the hairless stomach. Peeta's chest shuddered when he did this. He pulled away the bed sheets. In the dark, he could see the fine scar that went around Peeta's thigh in a perfect circle. Here, the Capitol leg they gave him was attached. Gale skipped past Peeta's hardness and kissed the scar. He heard Peeta sigh.

"You don't have to," Peeta whispered. He was probably nervous. The times that they'd done this, it was with their hands only.

"It's okay," Gale said because it was. He felt a little humming in his stomach, the same kind of dull excitement that he got when he first kissed the inside of Odele Huddle's thigh.

He got Peeta naked, placed himself between his legs. It was the first time he'd seen Peeta up close, thick and pale, devoid of any hair.

He took him in his mouth. He didn't taste like Odele had.

He felt Peeta get stiffer as his mouth covered more territory. Peeta hissed. He knew what places were the best to touch, so he licked the areas slowly and tried to take all of him. Peeta's hips struggled to remain still. He cursed and drove his pelvis up a bit which mad Gale gag once or twice, but he didn't stop because the sounds Peeta made were making him hard against the mattress. Guys at school used to brag and tell stories about which girls had gotten to their knees, and how they'd done it, but no girl had ever gotten to their knees for him before. When he went down on Odele Huddle those years ago, nothing much happened. She'd sat there and shifted her hips a little while he wondered if he was doing anything right.

But this was easier somehow.

He licked the underside, closed his lips tightly around the head of his cock, and Peeta made a fluttery sound in the back of his throat. His breath hitched as he mumbled out Gale's name and a series of things like "God," and "fuck," and "please."

"I'm gonna come," he said quickly when Gale tightened his lips again.

The words made his own dick twitch. He kept going, hummed a bit when Peeta hit the back of his throat. He didn't mean to graze him with his teeth, but he did, and then Peeta shouted, a guttural noise. He didn't have the sense to take him out of his mouth as he came in waves. It filled his mouth and tasted alien and metallic.

It was awful to swallow. He did, though, gritting his teeth.

Peeta's breathing was heavy as they lay still for the moment. He looked worn out, but his hands were strong, grabbing Gale by the shoulders and pulling him down with him. Gale fit himself against his arms, and Peeta pressed his face against his chest. Gale was the one who always held him, not the other way around, so his chest tightened in an odd way as Peeta ran his fingers through his hair. He tried to relax.

"Um..." Peeta started. "Thank you."

"It's not so bad."

"Maybe I could..." Peeta trailed off, let his hand stay still in Gale's hair.

"Maybe," Gale said, but he'd gone soft. It was calm now. He didn't feel the electricity, just the quiet hum of the nighttime; the beat of both their hearts in the background.

"They look down upon it...in the Seam?" Peeta asked. Gale sometimes forgot that he was with a merchant boy. "If you're a man and...you're with one."

"They say it's Capitol act."

"But there were lots of women with men in the Capitol. I turned on the television a man was fucking a girl in front of an audience."

"I saw FInnick Odair fucking a man on television once," Gale said. "It's the older folks in the Seam. They think it's strange. If you're with someone and you can't make babies with them, they think there's no point."

"I'd rather not make babies with anyone. Not here."

Gale's mind went alight with a memory.

"Katniss said she would never have kids."

He felt Peeta's chest tighten and he instantly regretted mentioning it. After a minute, Peeta said,

"She was right, though. It's better not to bring them...into this...into this place."

"I know."

Peeta sighed as Gale's lids went droopy. Sleep was close again even though it was probably only a few hours until sunrise. He smelled Peeta's salty skin; saliva and sex and the ever present buttery aroma of baking.

* * *

Hazelle asked him one day when the kids were still at school.

"Is it true that you're staying with Peeta Mellark?" Her voice was slow. She had the words caught in her throat. At the sound of Peeta's name, Gale wanted to sprint, but he didn't.

"Is that the talk around town now?" he asked. He meant to phrase it lightheartedly, but it came out sounding choked. He rinsed the blood from his hands until they were clean, and then kept them buried in the water so that he looked busy, so that he wouldn't have to look at her. He felt her watching.

"It's easy enough to spot anybody in this town. Even in Victor's Village." She stopped looking at him, returning to her rack.

"He's my friend," Gale felt the need to say.

"And you live there now, Gale?" Her Seam eyes looked at him again. He wanted to peel her gaze away from him. His mother saw all. She knew her children through and through. "Is it because of Katniss?"

"I have to go."

He dried his hands on the rag. He scrabbled for his full game bag, the reliable old coat he had to wear now that it was cold. Morning frost turned to all-day frost, crunching underfoot. Winter loomed, and Gale hated how the sun stayed away, far beyond the ashy clouds. A winter in District Twelve meant grey, endless, endless grey under your feet, in the snow, in the sky, all around. He held the doorknob, ready to flee into it.

Then Hazelle let out a sob. It was powerful, crushing. It had been bottled up forever and was popping like the tabs of those fizzy drinks Peeta made him try. It reminded him of the sounds she used to make after the mining explosion.

"Ma," he started, but really, not knowing where to start.

Her shoulders shook and shuddered. Gently, he set the gear back down on the floor. This was new to him, this comforting thing, and he didn't know if he should put his arms around his mother because he was most likely the cause of her suffering. Nonetheless, he approached her and touched her arm.

"Ma," he said again, and this time she turned around. Her tired face looked more haggard than ever. When was the last time he really looked at his mother's face?

"Why don't you come home, Gale?" she said quietly. Her hand reached up to caress his cheek.

At this plea, his defenses went up. He could not come back home in the same way he could not bring Katniss back from the dead. It was an impossible thought.

"But...everyone's fine, aren't they? Everyone's doing just fine." The kids were fed, the chores finished, everything was fine.

"What do you _mean_ fine?" She shook her head, pressing her fingertips into the corners of her eyes. "It's not 've left us, haven't you?"

He wanted to say that everything left _him_ , not the other way around. He would hold ontoresponsibility, the need to keep his family alive, but it was true that he felt separated from them in a way he couldn't begin to describe. The Seam died inside him, the haven of the woods, the sweetness of hunted animal flesh, the warmth of a nice evening fire- all dead like her.

Hazelle undid him. He could feel the gentle patchwork inside him coming apart at the seams. The patchwork that Peeta worked so hard on.

Katniss in his mind, Katniss in the paintings, always looking at him, always wondering why he was treating his family with this reckless abandon. _It's because of you,_ he thought to Katniss. _It's because of him._

"I feed the kids. I take care of them, same as always, so what do you want from me? What do you _fucking_ want from me?"

"Don't you speak to me that way, Gale Hawthorne-"

"You want me to be Dad, is that it? " he shouted.

He slammed his fist into the counter and she jumped at the violence. Then her face hardened, and she slapped her son across the cheek like she had not done since he was a boy. The sudden stinging pain of it, the shock of it, made him step back from her until he was pressed to the kitchen table.

They stared at each other for moments that felt like days until Hazelle wavered and she reached out toward him. He held still. She ensnared him like he would ensnare a rabbit. She sighed low and heavy against his arm, rocked back and forth until he felt it was safe to put his arms around her as well. When he was young and Rory was just a bump under her dress, she would rock him like this and he would wrap his skinny legs around her swollen belly. He could fall asleep to that motion.

"I'm sorry she died," Hazelle said. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, baby."

Gale's muscles tensed. Hazelle must have felt it because she held on tighter.

"Don't go," she said.

"I have to go."

Gale untangled himself from her. He left her reaching out for hi m. Nothing was fair, of course, he knew that. She just wanted her baby back. She wanted for everything to go back to the way it was.

But everyone wants for something in District Twelve.

* * *

The first time Peeta got a phone call, his mouth was around Gale's cock.

It was a delicious mixture of pain and heat and overwhelming wetness. Gale died a little when he finally shouted, coming all over the hollow of Peeta's neck.

And then the phone rang as he was coming down, as his hardness ebbed away in Peeta's mouth. It was a ring that he'd never heard before; a sharp sound that cut through the heat and made everything go cold. Peeta sat up, the sheets bunching around him.

"What's-" Gale started, but Peeta was already getting out of the bed. He walked out of the room wearing nothing. He heard him thumping down the stairs. Gale heard a faint, "hello?"

While Gale was alone, he thought about what his mother was doing at that moment. Asleep, or maybe soothing Vick who had a chest cold. He hadn't spoken to her in a week, he only dropped a half-full game bag on the back doorstep and left without saying hello.

It was a short phone call, whatever it was. He came back into the room only a few minutes later. He didn't catch Gale's eyes when he walked past the bed, he just moved into the bathroom and shut the door robotically.

Worry planted itself like a bulb in the pit of Gale's stomach. He kicked away the sweaty sheets, feeling as though something was wrong. The sound of the phone itself felt wrong. Naked, he hovered by the bathroom door and heard the shower turn on.

Inside, Peeta was in the glass box. Showers were a new thing to Gale, who always had to take uncomfortable baths with cold water and use eucalyptus plant for scent, but Peeta had a shower that ran hot water. There was a dispenser installed that spat out all sorts of powerful smelling soaps. Peeta turned to look at him as he opened the door. He backed against the wall a bit so they could both fit inside.

"Who was calling?" he asked. Warm water hit his back and he tried hard not to sigh. Peeta didn't answer. "You gonna talk to me?"

"It was Portia."

"Who's Portia?"

Peeta stuck his head under the rushing water to muffle the sound of him saying,

"My stylist."

Gale remembered if he thought about it hard enough, which he didn't like doing. Portia was the one who set Peeta on fire. Before Gale could ask, Peeta just said it.

"The Victory Tour is soon."

It felt like a little kick to the heart. His pulse started to thrum against his chest. He forgot about it. He forgot that he was only in this shower because it belonged to a Victor. Peeta's face flashed at him from distant memories, VICTOR, VICTOR, VICTOR.

"I forgot about it," he said.

Peeta nodded, shaking the water from his hair only to soak it again.

"So did I."

How many weeks would it be? He already felt the emptiness easing into him, an old familiar friend. He did the only thing he could think of to stop the losing feeling from taking him over. He bent his neck to rest his forehead in between Peeta's shoulder blades, much like Peeta did that first night. His arms snaked around to his stomach and pressed Peeta against him. He held on tightly. He held on tighter than his mother had.

"Don't go," he said.

"I have to."

* * *

They spent the day before the tour in bed. They ate toast and jam for meals. Around noon, they got bored and took off their clothes, trading orgasms and kisses, napping after, and waking up to hunger again. When night finally came, they tossed their arms and legs together to rest against the pillows.

"On Tv," Peeta said suddenly. "They might make me...they might make me say things."

"What kind of things?"

"Things about Katniss." His voice dropped to a whisper when he said her name. He took a shaky breath. "In the Capitol, they think that I'm the Victor because she sacrificed herself."

Neither of them knew if this was true or not, but Peeta kept talking.

"It's because I didn't kill anyone. And there's never Victors who just win by..." He trailed off, but Gale knew he was going to say _win by luck._

"What about that girl from Four?" The one who the cameras never showed until the arena flooded. It was years ago, but he remembered her because there had been little killing that year. When they did show her, it was the hours upon hours she spent treading water. It was the most peaceful games he'd ever seen. "From a few years back. She just had to swim to stay alive."

"They don't like it," Peeta said, shaking his head.

Maybe Gale understood. The Capitol wanted a reason for why Peeta won as much as they did.

They tried to stay awake with drooping eyelids and tight chests. Peeta let his head fall onto Gale's shoulder. After a while, he started to snore softly and Gale tried to hold onto the moment. He wished it would be enough to last through the weeks soon to come, but he knew that old habits of loneliness die hard. He kissed Peeta, waking him up with his mouth.

He took in the blue eyes. He hoped they would be the same when he came back.

The next day, another Capitol parade would invade the town with the camera crews, the makeup, the costumes, the lighting, Effie fucking Trinket. Peeta told him he should stay away until he left. There would be cameras and there would be questions. He dragged his nails in circles around Peeta's chest. They said goodbye without saying goodbye.

 


	2. Part Two

 

Peeta fumbled with complex lacing at the front of his shirt for more than twenty minutes. With each tug of the fabric, the walls of his Training Center bedroom got closer together. By the time it was laced up, he could barely breathe. He was stuck inside the closet space of the room.  
  
And he hadn’t slept in many nights.

The Victory Tour made it difficult to keep track of the days. They all seemed welded together by similar speeches and the sound of Effie Trinket’s voice saying the same things over and over again; the schedule, Peeta, remember! The same weepy families that stood in the crowds became one solid, sad, sometimes angry face repeated again and again. He didn’t want to look at them.

He also wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d been traveling now, just that he was in the Capitol finally. He was done with the speeches. He wouldn’t have to talk about Katniss for a while after this. The banquet was tonight, but he just wanted to go home to his own District to celebrate, if only to see the Seam kids go delirious with the food that would be served. He wanted to go to sleep with sweaty arms around him.

A knock came, followed too closely by the entire prep team storming into his room.

“Dear me, Peeta, you’re face is a mess." It was Gavir, the tallest of the three with sharp, spiky yellow hair. Behind him, Eulla and Yismet carried a heavy looking case of makeup. Gavir always did the talking. Eulla and Yismet mostly whispered to themselves when they stoked moisturizer into Peeta’s face or tore the hair away from his sideburns.

Today, their movements were oddly swift and airy. The giggled and stared off into space every few minutes. Peeta suspected they were on some kind of Capitol drug because he’d seen people on morphling before, and they all had that easy listlessness about them. The pupils of their eyes were just pinpricks. It made Yismet’s irises seem larger and more purple than they really were.  
  
“What are you guys on?” he decided to ask as Yismet started to apply a thin line of flesh colored makeup around his eyes. She blinked at him and paused.

“Pardon me, Peeta?” She sounded crystalline and small.

“What do you take? Your eyes look different.”

Eulla giggled suddenly as she fished through the makeup.

“It’s just a little something,” Yismet said. The corners of her mouth twitched, wanting badly to smile, but she held it back.

“You’ve never tried Sparkle?” asked Eulla with an incredulous voice.

“It’s wonderful, Peeta,” said Yismet.

Gavir, who was massaging his scalp with some kind of cream, tipped Peeta’s head back so that he saw him upside down. From here, the man looked like a crude impersonation of the sun. He was bright and yellow, and it almost hurt Peeta’s eyes to stare at him.

“Do you want to try it?” he asked.

Peeta wondered how much worse it could be for you than white liquor.

Eulla ruffled around under her feathered costume and produced a small, silver box that looked like it would hold a ring. She stretched out her pointed fingers to hand it to him. Curiously, Peeta opened the little box. Inside was a cache of powder. He knew instantly why it was called “Sparkle” because it seemed to shine in the light like a billion microscopic diamonds.  
  
“How do you do it?”

“Just a dab on the tongue. It’s sweet,” said Eulla, coming up beside Yismet. She dipped her smallest finger into the powder and some if it stuck to her skin. She sucked on her finger like it was candy.

“It’s even sweeter in your nose,” Yismet said. She pinched a bit of the powder and placed it on the heel of her hand. She snorted it in one big breath.

Peeta asked if he could have it, and Eulla giggled madly at the request.

“Of course you can. It will be _such fun_ , Peeta.”

He stowed the Sparkle in his pocket for later. Gale’s face surfaced in his mind and he knew that he would never approve because Katniss would never approve. But neither of them there with him. Peeta no longer cared about being a piece of their games. He no longer cared about staying himself while he was here. In fact, he wanted to be something else more than anything. And he wanted to go to sleep, but he just couldn’t.

By the time the prep team was finished with him, Peeta was already icing himself over. He smoothed down the wrinkles, sanded the rough edges until he could stand up with a sort of weightlessness. Soon he would be home. Soon he would be with Gale. He could hold onto that for the time being.

The final touch was a perfect smile. He slid it onto his face like it was just another article of clothing.

* * *

  
There was food everywhere.

People crammed it down their throats and regurgitated it as it rained down in an endless supply. Memories of hallow stomach pains shot through him as he eyed the tables and tables of nourishment. He found the most comforting thing he could think of, thin slivers of chocolate cake stacked on top of each other. The frosting was shaded and dark in areas so the whole thing looked like a mountain. It was sweet and delicious, but it didn’t taste like his older brother’s recipe. He swallowed it thickly and welcomed a glass of some kind of bubbly drink from a passing Avox.  
  
Every five minutes or so, he was introduced to a new person. He stopped trying to remember their names and just silently referred to them by their features. _No Eyebrows, Jeweled Tongue, Snake Hair._

He laughed when they laughed. He leaned into their flirtation. He rolled along with the conversations like any live person might.

Three glasses of bubbly drink later, he was getting better at the talking. People crowded around him and they joked with him, touched his shoulders and face. One man asked him,

“You must feel so lucky that Katniss loved you _so much_ , don’t you?”

He slammed back the last of his third drink and said the sentence easily,

“She gave the ultimate sacrifice for me and for that, I will always love her.”

Saying it was easy; thinking it was like like splitting open freshly healed cuts. How he hated it here, where nothing was private and everything was magnified. None of these people were truly aware of the real scar tissue underneath the makeup, so much like the bakery burns inflicted as a kid. But they had vague images of him as this hurt lover boy and they flaunted it in an incorrect way. And they prettied him up and took away the war wounds so that it seemed there was never a war at all. Even the old bakery burns were gone now.  
  
He felt nauseous and dangerous, so he made up a suave excuse to break away from the crowd. They dispersed and he moved to a safe corner somewhere beyond a food table. There was a small nook between the hallway that led to the bathrooms and the hallway that led to the kitchens. He pressed himself into it where the light was much dimmer.  
  
The loud music seemed quieter here. He could breathe. He allowed himself a few moments to send silent prayers back to District 12. He wanted to go home so much, it was all he could think about.

“You’re very good, you know,” said a voice. He whirled around. On the wall beside him stood a woman. In the faint red glow, he recognized her features, but couldn’t place who she was. She had on a red dress that fell around her shoulders and pushed her breasts up. Her hair was short and her eyes were very, very dark with makeup. She was more subdued than the normal Capitol people, though. She had no strange body modifications that he could see of.

“What?” he asked.

“ _I said_ you’re good. At all this.” She waved her hands around. She sounded annoyed and he didn’t know why. “You’ve got them right by the balls.”  
  
“Who are you?”

“And here I thought I was famous.” She stepped close enough that he could smell something on her. It was like burnt sugar. It only clicked when she smiled at him. He couldn’t remember her name but he did remember her face. He remembered what her head looked like with a crown upon it.

“You’re a Victor, right?” he said, strangely awed.

“So are you.”

When he didn’t say anything back to her, she took the opportunity to take his hand with hers. It was small and perfect, nothing at all like a hunter’s hand. She looked intently at him, and also, she looked inexplicably angry.

“Johanna Mason. I’m extending an invitation to you,” she said. “Come upstairs in fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t think I-”

“Haymitch will cover for you.” She said it with a roll of her eyes, as if he was supposed to know that Haymitch and her were acquainted.

Peeta blinked and stared for a moment longer. As much as he did not want to be at the banquet with all these fans and sponsors and gamemakers and fraudulent humans, he wanted even more to be left alone by the woman. What would she want from him upstairs and in fifteen minutes? Sex? Was that what this was about?  
  
“What’s upstairs?” he asked. He imagined her saying something cheeky like, “a bed”, or “me”, but she only said,

“Relax, Mellark, it’ll be good for you.”

It intrigued him. He tried to imagine a soft person like her underneath him-- curvy hips and full lips, full breasts, with all the things he used to fantasize about. His dick still twitched at the thought, but then the images kept getting muddled by the flat planes of chest, and course hair, and the hard jaw lines he was used to in his bed. Johanna stared to talk again as his reverie turned into a full on memory; Gale’s stomach muscles contracting under his palm while Peeta finished him with the other hand.

He stopped paying attention and he took out the little box of powder to contemplate it, simply for something to do. He couldn’t think of a thing to say to her.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Her hand darted out too fast for him to pull away. Swiftness was never his strong suit, anyway. She opened the ring box and smiled at its contents.

“You don’t look like you sparkle, Mellark.”

He didn’t really know what that meant.

“I haven’t tried it yet.”

“Here,” she said, dipping her pinky in like Eulla had. She held out her hand, expecting him to suck on her finger. Again, he felt soft arousal sprout from the pit of his stomach. He didn’t want to be here anymore, in the Capitol, in the room. He didn’t want to keep daydreaming of his District and his boy at home, and Johanna seemed like a nice distraction.

He put her finger in his mouth. It kind of reminded him of licking the icing from his father’s fingers on cake day, but he buried that as well.

As his tongue tasted her, he knew Eulla was right; it was sweet. She was salty. The two things mixed pleasantly in his mouth. After him, she took a little bit and sniffed it like Yismet had.

His heart began to pulse in his throat. It was nice, like a pure drumbeat in his chest. He closed his eyes as a wave of silver dropped over him- it was very sudden. Liquid metal ran parallel to his organs until he could hear it filling up his ears. Underneath, the drumbeat went on and on and on.

“My heart...” he whispered.  
  
She hummed in response.

His hands felt like they weren’t attached. He lifted them experimentally, fingers shifting and reaching with airless strength. He touched the woman’s chest, her sternum, where he could feel her heart out of sync with his. His heart, and her heart, and his heart, and her heart, and bump-bump-bump-bump it went. He laughed and the sound was musical, like a valley song from his District.

“Your heart,” he said.

Her hands touched his head. Every follicle breathed and tingled when she ruffled his hair.

“Stay normal, alright? Everything’s an illusion.” She looked into his eyes when she said this. They were dark, dark, eyes. He missed the grey ones. Katniss had grey eyes, so did Gale. That’s why he loved Gale, but he would never tell Gale this.

His eyes went south to her mountain breasts under the red dress.

“Let’s go now,” he said urgently. “Let’s go upstairs.”

She took his hand again. The touch tingled and spread to his arms.

“Oh, kid,” she said.

They went on a journey through long red hallways, long red rooms, red painting and red lights. The red dress on her body; the red hands on her hips. Red took them up the stairs, up endless mountains of stairs until Peeta was tired and wanted to lie down on the red plush carpet. Her words were liquid, telling him to come when he got distracted by the paintings on the walls and the bright red lights in the ceiling. Nothing like blood. He wasn’t thinking about blood.

He forgot what he was doing and what was happening for a million years of their journey. It passed by in blinks until Peeta finally stood still inside a room that was no longer red.

It was blue- soft blue, deep blue, watery blue, and it made his chest ache with betrayal. He missed the red. The woman was gone from his line of sight, his stomach tingled, and he needed to find her before she was too lost. He ran his hands through his hair, and they came back sticky with hair products. Where did she go? He dropped to the carpet, looked under that blue bed, but she was not there, and he pulled himself out of it like it was a tunnel.

“Johanna,” he called softly.

He searched under a blue chair for her, but there was a pair of smooth legs in front of him that were in the way. He touched them and they moved, which made him jump back a bit. The legs scared him. Legs shouldn’t be here. On all fours, he looked up at the legs and the hips they were attached to, and the torso after that, and the shoulders, and the face.

“You’re high,” said the man. He was beautiful. He was familiar, like a painting he’d once seen. He was Finnick Odair.

“Where did she go?” he asked Finnick Odair. Somewhere in his brain, his synapses screamed until some kind of memory surfaced. _“I once saw Finnick Odair fucking a man on television.”_

“I’m right here, brainless.” She was behind him. He turned to face her, still on the ground. Everything blurred together. He groaned because her red dress looked all wrong in the blue room.

“What the hell did you do to him, Jo?”

“Oh please, like you never sparkle? It was his stuff anyway.”

“He doesn’t look good.”

Then there were hands on him. They pulled him up by the arms and led him somewhere soft. He detected anger in their chatter as it went on, kind of like when he was a boy and he would hear his parents screaming through the walls. The words weren’t really reaching him, but he felt that nervous pull at the bottom of his stomach. His prosthetic leg ached suddenly, strongly, like Cato’s sword was plunging deep down to the phantom bone. He groaned again and again from the odd pain until something warm went down his throat, like tea, but more bitter.

“Drink it up, come on,” said the man. The man’s hands smelled like Gale after sex- salty and pungent. He drank up whatever it was that poured into his mouth.

Somewhere between swallowing and resting back on the pillow, he fell completely to sleep. He dreamed something horrible, and shiny, and bloody, like the nightmares he always had when there was nothing nice to wake up to. But they were prettier somehow, and Peeta thought it had something to do with being in the Capitol, being in this pretty, illusioned place.

* * *

The last thing he remembered was a red dress.

He blinked a few times, only just noticing the same red dress draped on the chair beside his bed. He reached out, held the fabric in his hands, and it occurred to him that the brown and pink in his peripheral was a body. He looked down and she was next to him, without clothes, tangled in the sheets. She’d been hogging them all night, probably. Peeta felt cold.

His heart beat fast.

“Wake up,” he said. He took a moment to look around and realize that he was back in the Training Center, which made him feel hopeful, but it was a false sense of home he was feeling.

She grimaced while he prodded her bare thigh to wake her.

“Get up,” he said again. He felt cheated, like he was a victim of some kind of fraud.

“Easy,” she said with her eyes still closed. Peeta scrambled away from the bed. His clothes were on, so he hoped it meant that he never kissed Johanna, though he could remember wanting to last night. He could remember her finger in his mouth.

Panic started to build as she crawled up from his mattress with a groan and a grimace.

“Relax, Mellark.”

“I don’t...I don’t remember...” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Forcing the memories forward was like trying to reach for something in pitch darkness.

“Sparkle can do that. Champagne didn’t help, either.”

She sat back down on the bed in a huff, crossing her arms over her chest, which Peeta only then realized, was bare. He averted his eyes.

“Sit down, I want to talk to you,” she said.

“About what?”  
  
“Don’t be a child, just sit down.”

He un-crossed his own arms and moved to the edge of the bed. He didn’t want to sit and talk to her because he was starting to remember the things he’d said and done last night. The way he’d wanted to go upstairs with her, the way he had hoped for her to take off the dress. Now, it made his stomach feel leaden and sick. Gale was so far away, and he was supposed to go home tomorrow, but it felt like tomorrow was never going to arrive.

Peeta sat with his back turned to her. His head really hurt now that he was awake, and his eyes were still full of dead tears.

“What do you want?” he asked. He wished she would leave. Johanna felt like a sore that he couldn’t shake. He didn’t want too bring the feeling home with him.

“I want to know if Snow has talked to you yet.”

“President Snow?”

“No, the goddamn snow on the ground.”

This time, he rolled his eyes at her.

“Why would he?” Peeta asked, thinking about the way Snow had looked at him when he won.

“He hasn’t told you about the business?”

“What business?”

Johanna looked off a little, toward the window.

“Finnick and me were going to walk you through it last night...but that didn’t go as well as I planned, did it?”

“i’ve never- I’ve never done that stuff before.” Shame for taking the Sparkle sat heavy inside him and he felt self defensive. She reminded him of a Career.

“No shit,” she said. She leaned back a bit on her hands. He watched her breasts sway with the movement and felt his dick stir so he averted his eyes and listened to her go on. “You’re handsome. You’re good with the crowds. I meant what I said last night, you’re good at this shit.”

He didn’t know if this was supposed to be a compliment. She went on when he said nothing.  
  
“Snow is going to ask you to join the business. The Victor business.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Peeta said. Discontentment started to rise up through his esophagus and it gave him the delirious urge to giggle, and it felt like Johanna was going to tell him something horrible, but then he couldn’t stop her from saying,

“You’re going to fuck your Sponsors. You’re going to fuck anyone that Snow asks you to. And I know that you know- he isn’t really asking.”

Peeta thought of a million things to say or do in response. Maybe he would have told Johanna that he suspected something like this “business” because he’d seen so many Victors on television having sex or being voted into relationships with strange Capitol men and women, and he never understood why anyone would volunteer themselves for those kinds of Games. He could have screamed or cried because she was right about Snow, because this was the other shoe dropping, the knife being twisted, and that there was no such thing as defiance to their President (Haymitch had implied this much when he was too drunk, when Peeta helped him to bed and force fed him water in the night, and secrets about the family who was killed would spill lout of him like he was a leaky cup).

Instead, with Gale’s face and Gale’s body in his mind, he said,  
  
“I can’t...I can’t sleep with... There’s someone.”

She looked a little mad, staring straight into his eyes like cats do before they get bored and saunter off.

“You know you have to cooperate, right?” And her face softened just slightly. “Your girl will understand.”

Peeta shook his head.

“He won’t understand.”

Johanna raised her eyebrows in surprise because Peeta forgot that Gale might have been a secret, that it might be something to hide, or something surprising. But her face softened even more. She said,

“Snow probably already knows about him.”

Peeta let a short laugh escape him. He felt too warm, like a fever was about to break inside him. Softly, he pressed his aching forehead into the palm of his hand. Johanna asked him,

“Are you going to freak out?”

Peeta thought about it.

“No,” he said.

“Good.” She shifted on the bed, leaning back and sinking into the pillow. “They’re all the same so they’re easy to forget. You come here, get a little help from the Sparkle fairy, you fuck them, and you go home. You can forget about it until you have to come back. It’s not that bad.”

He said nothing. Eventually, she added,

“He’ll kill him. He’ll kill your mother. It’s only bad if you don’t do it.”

For a few long minutes, Peeta let all the dread soak into his blood and the worrying started to ebb away at the smooth stone surface of him. He fell ungracefully beside her in the bed, looking up at the ceiling. He thought of the skinny, dark haired girls who leaned against the outside of The Hob or stood in the dark alleys by the mines. They always leaned toward blonde boys like Peeta, and blonde boys like him would tell stories at school about a girl who had gotten to her knees for only half a sack of red beans. His mother cursed ugly words about them at the dinner table, called them old words- like whores. They always seemed so small to Peeta.

He imagined his own body twisted with a bright pink, pierced, tattooed, made up woman like Effie. He would seem smaller than a Capitol freak with their splendors and colors. He would be as small and monochrome as those girls in the Seam.

He wanted to cry, but held it in like he had so many times before. His mother hated when they cried, it only made it worse. He was good at stilling a quivering chin. He imagined deserts in his eyes.

“Have you ever fucked a woman?” Johanna suddenly asked.

“No.”

“You can fuck me if you want.” She reached over and touched his chest. The gesture was somewhere between affectionate and pitying. “You don’t want your first time to be with one of them.”

Peeta closed his eyes with waves of Gale, dark skin and dark shadows between legs, rough hands and lips, gentle sounds, all rolled through him and burst at the epicenter of his chest. He missed him so much, it was like the phantom aches he felt in his leg that was gone.

“Okay,” he told Johanna, and almost instantly, she rolled over to place her knees on either side of his hips. She leaned forward to kiss him and her short hair tickled his forehead. Her hands pinned up his arms so that she could slide his shirt up. He closed his eyes after a few minutes of her tongue and teeth and lips pressing on him, biting him. He let her do whatever she would to him with a detached nervousness.

When her hand made him hard, he felt her shift on top of him, pushing her underwear aside, and then it was warm and wet and he opened his eyes to find her hovering over him. She touched her finger to his lips once, then pushed her whole self down until it was done- and he was fucking her, and it was the first person he had ever been inside.

She held his hips and kept rolling her own, put his hand on her and made him rub circles until everything was white and blinding. He didn’t last long.

When he was about to come, he thought suddenly and strongly of Katniss. How many dreams like this had there been? While it happened, her face froze in his mind- from grey speckled eyes to the braid coiled on her shoulder, to the dry lips and olive cheeks that would so often be rushed with pink.

* * *

He held on to the hope that he would feel better when he was home.

But then, even when he saw the grey sky above his District, he couldn’t shake the feeling in his stomach, the uncomfortable turning.

Peeta returned to the familiar square outside the justice building, watching the Capitol people and Peacekeepers bustle around. Self-folding chairs and tables opened like flowers to create the feasting area. Skinny families watched hungrily, just waiting for food to fill up those tables.

He let the interviews go on for a bit until Portia seemed to take pity on him and told the crews that she had to get the Victor ready for his debut. When it was just the two of them, she said,

“You seem distracted.”

“I’m looking for someone,” Peeta replied.

Peeta walked quickly with her, the camera crew, Effie, and the prep team followed with little huffs and disdainful comments about the state of the pavement under their feet, which was cracked and coated in the ever present coal dust. He wished they would leave so that he could find Gale. When he did find Gale, they’d have to be utterly alone. Otherwise, it would all be fake, everything they would say.

“Come, let’s get your face on,” Portia said. She took his arm and escorted him through his own District, past the onlookers who used to be his neighbors and friends.

Peeta was surprised to see that his father and oldest brother were waiting outside his house in Victor’s Village. Bannock still had flour ghosting on his dark pants. His father looked older than he remembered, more grey at the temples.

Effie burst forward with all her pleasantries, to which his brother began to flush at, eyes darting around his feet as they avoided Peeta and the camera crew behind him. Peeta stared at the door to his house. What he wouldn’t give to be under the heavy blankets of his bed right now. He averted his eyes from his father and focused on Bannock, who looked like he wanted to cry (Bannock was always crying as a boy, and when mother hit him, he cried louder, which made her hit harder).

“I- I don’t suppose we could have a- a moment alone with Peeta. Family matter, you see,” Mr. Mellark said with such trepidation.

Effie placed her hand on Peeta’s shoulder. He could practically hear the cogs of her brain working to come up with a charming response.

“Well, of course, we have a strict schedule to stick to, but come along while Peeta get’s ready, by all means!”

Peeta almost laughed. Effie was inviting them into his own house.

The air inside his house felt stale and undisturbed. No windows had been opened recently, which made Peeta believe that Gale had not been in this house since he left. It was strange how only a few weeks made everything warped, like the color of his counter top, which always seemed bright to Peeta, and now looked pallid. He shook his head minutely. The colors of the Capitol had gotten to him.

While the prep team and Portia began setting up in the living room, pulling shiny metal trunks and clothes racks through the threshold, Peeta faced his father and raised his eyebrows. Maybe he should have said something nice, something welcoming, but nothing came to him.

“Your...trip was good?” his father asked.

“It went fine.” Peeta hated his voice, so neutral and empty.

“We seen the tour on television,” Bannock said. “From Eleven to One. Momma saw, too.”

“She hasn’t been able to do much but watch television,” his father said.

“Why is that?” Peeta could feel the bad news about to spring forward like you can feel a sneeze building in you eyes.

“Your mother’s taken quite ill, son.”

“Whole damn District’s taken quite ill, more like.” Bannock crossed his arms and lowered his voice. “Wash up your hands as soon as you can.”

“The whole District?” Peeta asked.

“It’s a new fever. Half the miners are in the sickbed. Mayor’s passing out medicine today on account of the Tour and the celebration, I suppose,” said his father. He could hear the relief in his voice.

“Is she okay?” Peeta felt a brief flicker of fear light up, but it was dull. He couldn’t really picture his mother in a sickbed, as hard as he tried. She was a stone statue in his mind, something infallible.

Bannock took a deep breath.

“Hoping so. Hoping the medicine takes.” He absently brushed the flour from his pants. “Lot of dead Seamers these past few weeks.”

When Bannock said this, Peeta’s heart kicked. He pictured Gale, Gale’s siblings, Gale’s hard-eyed mother. He looked out the window, unable to escape.

“Thanks,” Peeta said. He cleared his throat. “I’ll...I’ll stop by later, after this...” He gestured to the set up behind him, where Effie was snapping her fingers at the camera crew.

“It’s good to see you, son.” His father reached to place his hand on Peeta’s shoulder. It was meant to be comforting but it only felt like a weight pulling him down.

He bid his family goodbye when Effie came looking for him, claiming that his bath was drawn and growing cold. He let Gavir and Eulla wash him, scrub him, rip the hair once more from his face. He sat in the lukewarm water, only barely paying any attention the the instructions being fed to him.

Outside the window, the District was a grey mess in the distance.

_“Lot of dead Seamers these past few weeks.”_

Sickness was not uncommon in the District. Every few years or so, some kind a flu came and went like a storm, tearing families apart like a tornado would destroy the flimsy shacks they lived in. The urge to go to Gale was stronger than before. It broke through the barrier that was inside him, enough that when Portia was fitting him in a black dressing shirt, he said, unable to stand still,

“I need to leave. Only for an hour.”

Portia stopped adjusting his collar, turned his cheek toward her, and looked in his eyes.

“It’s that someone you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

“I just need to...I just need to check up on him.”

Portia looked down and shook her head slightly, and Peeta thought it was a lost cause, that he would be forced through these constant waiting periods forever.

“You’ll find him tonight. At the banquet, I’m sure.”

Nothing felt sure.

A few hours later, he marveled at the absence of so many District 12 citizens, despite the amount of food laid out on the stretch tables in the square. Many people were missing while their families began to stock up on precious calories. He did feel a twinge of joy to see the skinny Seam kids running back and forth through the squares with whole turkey legs in both fists, greasy smiles on their faces. He sat on the stage with some of the Capitol officials, ,at a long dining table in the place where Peeta and Katniss had stood during the Reaping.

No one spoke of the sickness that was obviously plaguing the District, but Peeta watched the Capitol freaks squirm in discomfort when a coughing person was nearby. He supposed it was why they were eating on the stage, away from the crowd of sad, skinny, sick people

Peeta didn’t eat. He scanned the crowd over and over until his eyes were sore.

He knew that Gale was not here.

Down in the crowd, by the food tables, Peeta spotted Primrose Everdeen with a hand full of popped corn and another hand full of red candy that she was biting into. Peeta looked around at the table, all of the people enthralled in their drinks and meals and pointless conversations. He stood, excused himself, claimed that he was going to join the celebration in the square.

A few times, a hollow eyed mother would meet his eyes and nod in his direction as she escorted her children to another food table. It almost made everything worth it.

Primrose was the first to speak his name when he walked toward her. She swallowed the candy thickly, brushing her hands on the back of her too-big dress. He wondered it it was one of Katniss’s.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Mellark.” So polite. So proper. She gave Effie a run for her money. Peeta smiled at her and said,

“Hi, Prim.”

“This is...this is wonderful.” She gestured to the feast behind her, where the bowl of candy was still sitting.  
“Don’t stop on my account,” he told her, reaching around to grab a few red berries for himself. She smiled, a little bit of guilt hidden in her cheeks, and grabbed more handfuls. In a lower voice, Peeta asked,

“You haven’t been sick, have you?”

“Mother has me clean my hands with white liquor every time I go out. I’m lucky.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, suddenly nervous, as if speaking Gale’s name was a crime (which, while in the presence of all the Capitol dolls, it might have been).

“About Gale?”

He pulled at his collar, nodding, closing his eyes so that he couldn’t see anything on Prim’s face; if she looked sad, or solemn, or guilty, he would fear the worst.

“He’s alright.”

Peeta felt that tight chord of despair in his belly go slack. His entire body sagged.

“Do you know why he didn’t come tonight? There’s so much food...” The desperation crept into his voice and he regretted it.

Prim’s eyes then began to water, her lips began to tighten, and her face puckered as if the red berries had gone sour in her mouth. She wiped her cheeks before any tears could fall. She turned her head away ,embarrassed, sad for a reason.

“What is it?”

Her voice, small and solemn, said,

“Vick.” She sniffled. “He’s very sick.”

He threw a glance toward the banquet table on the stage, where no one was paying attention to him. Looking back to Prim, he shook his head, straightened himself up.

“Try to enjoy yourself, alright?”

He left her with the berries and the crowd.

* * *

It was all very bad timing.

Peeta walked through the Seam, past the dark, shaded shacks that were pushed back, surrounded by rusting makeshift contraptions and junk. An old woman sat on the porch, rocking back and forward with an unmoving head. He felt her watching him as he walked too quickly down the road.

He tended to stick out like a sore thumb in the Seam and that’s why he always avoided it, though he had a friend or two in school who had that disheveled, coal dusted look about them. He supposed, walking though these paths now, he would stick out if he was a Merchant or Seam brat either way because, either way, he was the Victor.

He relied on memory to get to Gale’s house. He knew it was near where Katniss lived, and he knew where Katniss lived because his father used to talk about Sabina Everdeen’s shack near the tree lines (and when he was drunk, he would talk about how he could have given Sabina a house that she deserved, a house in the Merchant quarters).

He stood outside several identical houses, each of them drooping in the same way toward the ground like rotting fruit. There were candles in the windows of some of them. Peeta saw a face or two poking out from behind curtains to sneak a glance at the stranger on the path. A woman extinguished her candle and shut the curtains tight so that it became darker on the street.

From the house on the left, Peeta heard coughing and he decided to knock there. He was out of place, out of the right to knock on doors, but now he moved forward with reckless abandon. Mustering hope was not easy, but he hoped that Gale’s brother was not dead. He hoped that the medicine hadn’t arrived too late. He wished that these past few weeks had been spent with Gale in their house, even though he didn’t know when or how it had become theirs.

He knocked so lightly, it sounded like a gentle branch hitting the window in the breeze. But someone came to the door.

It was a woman who opened it, letting warmth and light out onto the dark porch. She had bags that ran deep under her eyes, dark and red from crying. A red nose, dark, grey hair, and Gale’s brown eyes. He recognized her.

“Hello, Mrs. Hawthorne,” he said quietly.

Mrs. Hawthorne pulled on her elbow nervously. She let the door swing away from her until Peeta could see a fire burning behind her, a small child on the mat in front of it. And beyond that, a narrow hallway. Peeta secretly inhaled, smelling fire and coal dust , and the earthy, gamey smell of drying meat.

“Mr.Mellark,” she said, also quiet.

The little girl behind her crawled up onto her feet slowly and stood. She wore only a cloth diaper and a held a small blanket nervously up to her face, staring, staring, staring right at Peeta as if she knew who he was. He looked away, suddenly foolish, suddenly rash.

He was about to think of something dismissive to say when the shadows in the hallway of Gale’s house moved.

He moved.  
  
Out of the shadows, into the light, into the room where he commanded the space. Gale’s arms crossed over his chest and he kept walking until he could rest his hand on his mother’s shoulder, until he was up close and Peeta’s heart started to sing low, sad valley songs in his chest.

“It’s okay, Ma.” He pushed her slightly and she moved against his hand until he stood in front of the door. “Rory wants some tea,” he added.

Mrs. Hawthorne gave Peeta one strange look before she walked down the hallway, wiggling her fingers at the little girl by the fire.

“You’re home,” Gale said.

“Not quite.”

“Come on.” Gale stepped through the threshold and onto the porch with Peeta, shutting the door like it was a secret.

In the dark of the porch, Peeta reached for Gale’s hand and caught his wrist. For a moment, he watched the whites of Gale’s eyes staring at him and felt the light pressure of Gale’s hand in his. Then he let go, gesturing for Peeta to follow him over the railing of the porch. They leaped down into the unknown, soft grass under foot. They were at the side of Gale’s house, facing the tree line and pressed against the night. It was so dark, Peeta wondered how Gale could find his face.

He almost wept when he felt Gale’s hands on his cheeks. A second later, he was pressed against the damp wood of the house, and another second later, Gale was kissing his cheek sloppily, mapping a way toward Peeta’s lips.  
  
He wondered if he could taste Johanna still.

He kissed Peeta closed mouthed, tight, and warm, and hard. He squeezed him, almost crushing his ribs, and Peeta broke away to rest his face in the place against his neck and shoulder, smelling deep. It was so dark, that he couldn’t see him at all. He could only feel the hands on him, only smell the scent of woods and coal, only hear Gale breathing heavily through his nose. It might have been a dream.

“Is your brother okay?”

“Yeah,” he whispered back. “I don’t know. He got the medicine at the ration this morning. Sabina said he needs something to stop the burning in his lungs.”

“I’ll get it for him. Anything.”

Gale didn’t try to protest. This wasn’t bread, this was Vick’s life and he wouldn’t be too proud about it

He pulled away from Gale’s shoulder, waiting for his eyes to adjust in the dark. He saw the faint outline of his face. Peeta kissed his jawline.

“Did you miss me?” Gale asked.

It was unlike Gale to sound sentimental, unlike him to not hide what he wanted to say behind dry humor or wet kisses. Peeta kept him tight in his arms. He said,

“That’s an understatement.” He kissed Gale’s chest through his shirt. “I couldn’t even sleep.”

“Come here.”

He moved his face back to Gales and they kissed in earnest. His lips were strong and his tongue was soft, and it went on and on until Peeta’s chest got tight, then his pants, as Gale’s hips ghosted on his own. He wanted to burrow deep into him and never come out

But deep in the clothes that Gale wore was something that tasted vile in Peeta’s mouth. He froze to pull away, to inhale the scent more. It was familiar. He knew exactly what it was.

“Coal dust?” he said.“You stink of it.”  
  
“It’s hard to avoid, you know.”

“Yeah, but...” He stepped back. In the dark, his eyes had adjusted. He touched the fabric of Gale’s shirt, looked down to see that it was just an undershirt, that Gale wore a terribly familiar blue uniform tied at the waist. The realization popped into his head and he said, “The mines?”

Gale bit his cheek, looking around and then stepping away from Peeta a bit.

“There were no more options.”  
  
Peeta could so picture it; the march down to the Justice Building, the signing of his name upon a contract, the signing away of his lungs, of the daylight. The mines were worse than a plague of sickness. For the Seam kids, they were a manifestation of a disease that they were born with, deep in their blood, in their dusty, olive skin. You were born in the Seam with only one prospect; back breaking work for grain and oil, the odd slice of bread, the odd poached rabbit. Peeta had not considered that prospect for Gale until now.

Here he stood, surrounded by the overgrowth and the coal dust, a rich boy standing with a poor one. It became obvious how dire their situations really were. Two weeks were more like years in the Seam. In the Capitol, they were millenia.

“I wish you hadn’t.” He shook his head. “I wish you would have waited for me to-”

“Medicine costs, Mellark. _Everything_ costs. I couldn’t just- just throw squirrels at the problem this time." He paused to sigh and it rattled in his chest. “VIck almost died, you know? His heart stopped on the third night. It was the mines or nothing.”

Frustration surged through him, but like frustration does, it just swam back to his head and pressed on him. Peeta said,

“There’s nothing but...nothing but pain and death down there.”

“Don’t pretend like you know anything about what’s down there,” Gale said. He sounded cold. He had stepped back from Peeta even more and Peeta felt himself move like he was a magnet back to Gale.

Selfishly, he could only think of the time that would go to waste. In the days and evenings when they usually lazed about the house together, Gale would be gone deep under the earth, so far away from home. What time would he crawl into bed, dirty and too tired to even come? The anger was irrational, but it kept growing as the disappointment sunk in.

And he thought of Johanna. He thought of the days that he might spend in the Capitol from now on. His face might be on the programs. His body might go to the dogs. Peeta and Gale might just turn into ghosts who breezed past each other while the world spun out of their favor. He could feel it starting to happen in the dark, where Gale’s features were half-hidden.

“I’ll never see you.”

This made Gale’s nostrils flare in anger.

“What was I supposed to do, huh? You tell me that. While you’re off stuffing your face on that train-”

The frustration boiled over inside him and he felt everything that was in his head start shift like rocks tumbling down, sounding like thunder, and it felt like every chord inside him was about to snap until it did, finally, like it had been waiting to since the train stopped in District 11. Did Gale believe that? That Peeta slept peacefully in his cozy train compartment and had grapes fed to him while he drank chocolate and food that would cost a years worth of salary in the mines? Did he think that Peeta lazed around guiltlessly while he marvelled at his luck, his great goddamned luck? Did he not know that Peeta could hardly eat at all when the food was presented to him? He said,  
  
“Why don’t you take it, then? I’d be happy for you! You trade places with me and take the Victory Tour, and the money, and the fame, and the house, and you can take the Games, and I’ll go kill myself down in the mines every day instead.”

“Keep your fucking voice down,” Gale hissed.

Peeta felt the world spinning. He wanted to throw up. Katniss and the gurgling of her breath filled his ears and struck his stomach. They both just wanted to get back to a world where her valley songs could be heard, where her screams never existed. It was as simple as that, wasn’t it?

He reached out and grabbed Gale’s shirt in his fist, pulled his head down so that he could grind their foreheads together.  
  
“You think it’s so easy being the Victor.” He turned his head to look the other way, but all that he could see was darkness. “So wouldn’t you love to be me, Gale?” He saw red, he saw blood, he saw Katniss, and the sword, and the sound of of flesh and sheared metal was all around him. “And you can be the one who has to see her die every day an all day. You can remember what it’s like to watch it happen. And then you’ll have her all to yourself because that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Peeta slipped away from Gale before he could say anything. And and walked out from behind the porch, past the house, and onto the road. and kept walking, not knowing if he was being followed. On the street, he realized it was snowing and that he was alone. More alone than ever before because he didn’t even feel like himself anymore.

* * *

In the night, after the Effie kissed his cheeks and left on the train with everyone else, Peeta finally turned into the covers of his bed. He might have stayed there until he starved to death, if it was possible.

But after everything was silent, he heard a noise. The front door opening and closing. The sound of boots. The footsteps creaking through the house. The thud up the stairs. Peeta wondered if it was maybe President Snow, or someone coming to collect him and haul him off to be fucked a million ways. But he knew the sound of Gale’s breathing as it entered his bedroom. He heard him stripping off his clothes. He didn’t look up. When Gale climbed into the bed, he warmed it instantly. Peeta felt his skin pressing hot against his. Gale pressed his head into Peeta’s back and whispered,

“I don’t want her all to myself. Don’t you get it? Why would I want that? I don’t want to be alone in that.”

Then the air froze, and Peeta felt Gale’s hands caressing his sides gently.  
  
“I need you, too,” Gale said. “As much as you need me, I need you.”

He turned over and pulled Gale down to kiss him. They pressed themselves tightly together and twisted their legs up. He felt it all running through him like water through his veins. Gale, already naked, pushed Peeta’s clothes down and they widened their legs to move in circles against each other. He heard Gale groan softly.

He felt Gale sliding in between his ass and they kept at this motion, kissing the whole time, rubbing his face into Gale’s shoulder like he was trying to mark his scent. Gale coaxed him and rubbed him and kissed him until he was close, and he told him so. He waited until Gale could hardly breathe to come, and when he did, they were coming together. He stared into Gale’s eyes in the dark as it rushed over him, and he realized something; they weren’t much like Katniss’s eyes after all. He had more black specks, like coal rocks spreading through them, making them unique.

* * *

A few weeks later, Gale would stop by Peeta’s in the night after working, and his limbs would feel like metal as he pulled himself through the house, calling Peeta’s name. He would grab a slice of bread from the counter and eat it while trudging up the stairs to the bedroom, which would be empty. All the lights would be off in the house and the bed would be made.

The only light would come from Peeta’s study, where the floor was still an explosion of mess and color. Peeta had recently moved a desk into the space, kept his word at maintaining it without destroying everything he painted. Gale would go to the room, confused, and find a note sitting on the desk there.

_Capitol calls. Be back soon._

His heart would break a little because he would start to realize how far apart the world wants to drive them, and then he’d notice the little black sketchbook that Peeta left sitting on the desk by the note before he had time to feel sick about it.

He would flip through it, the sketchbook that Peeta never let him see. He would recognize himself in every drawing, all of them pictures of him. Pictures of him and Katniss together, laughing, of him and his brothers. Grey drawings of his smile, and a rabbit in his hand. Gale’s face from every angle. Gale’s face drawn in charcoal and pencil and bright blues and greens.

And the last sketch was Gale lying in bed beside Peeta, his head moved onto Peeta’s shoulder, hiding Peeta’s face with his own, and their torsos and legs twined together-- twined together in the sheets like a strong rope.

  
_fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow okay. sorry that this took so long. this story kind of fell out of my interest and I didn't do everything that I wanted to do with it, but it's finished and I guess that's more than I can say for, like, 70% of my fics. thank you so much for reading this!

**Author's Note:**

> The fic title and excerpt at the beginning is from a song called “Lofticries” by Purity Ring. Part two will be up soon. Thanks for reading this far! Disclaimer: I own nothing.


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